“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 Devon Energy Corp. (NYSE: DVN), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 01/27/2017 |
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| End date: | 01/26/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $46.64 | ||||
| End price/share: | $51.79 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 214.41 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 249.36 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $3.54 | ||||
| Total return: | 29.14% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.25% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,915.48 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.25%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,915.48 today (as of 01/26/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 29.14% (something to think about: how might DVN shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Devon Energy Corp. paid investors a total of $3.54/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 .44/share, we calculate that DVN has a current yield of approximately 0.85%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .44 against the original $46.64/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.82%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” — Mark Cuban
