“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2017, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. (NYSE: MMC), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 01/20/2017 |
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| End date: | 01/19/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $67.99 | ||||
| End price/share: | $158.27 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 147.08 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 160.76 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.59 | ||||
| Total return: | 154.44% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 20.54% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $25,448.13 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 20.54%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $25,448.13 today (as of 01/19/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 154.44% (something to think about: how might MMC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. paid investors a total of $8.59/share in dividends over the 5 holding period, marking a second component of the total return beyond share price change alone. Much like watering a tree, reinvesting dividends can help an investment to grow over time — for the above calculations we assume dividend reinvestment (and for this exercise the closing price on ex-date is used for the reinvestment of a given dividend).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 2.14/share, we calculate that MMC has a current yield of approximately 1.35%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.14 against the original $67.99/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.99%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.” — Benjamin Graham
