Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a five year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Verizon Communications Inc (NYSE: VZ)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2017.

Start date: 01/30/2017
$10,000

01/30/2017
$12,979

01/27/2022
End date: 01/27/2022
Start price/share: $49.37
End price/share: $51.19
Starting shares: 202.55
Ending shares: 253.50
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.18
Total return: 29.77%
Average annual return: 5.36%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,979.40

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,979.40 today (as of 01/27/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 29.77% (something to think about: how might VZ shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Verizon Communications Inc paid investors a total of $12.18/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 2.56/share, we calculate that VZ has a current yield of approximately 5.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.56 against the original $49.37/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.13%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don’t realize it at the time.” — Shelby Davis