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“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 NextEra Energy Inc (NYSE: NEE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2017.

Start date: 08/29/2017
$10,000

08/29/2017
  $26,038

08/26/2022
End date: 08/26/2022
Start price/share: $37.68
End price/share: $88.06
Starting shares: 265.39
Ending shares: 295.64
Dividends reinvested/share: $6.40
Total return: 160.34%
Average annual return: 21.12%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $26,038.94

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.12%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $26,038.94 today (as of 08/26/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 160.34% (something to think about: how might NEE shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that NextEra Energy Inc paid investors a total of $6.40/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 1.7/share, we calculate that NEE has a current yield of approximately 1.93%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.7 against the original $37.68/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.12%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than lost in the corrections themselves.” — Peter Lynch