“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 Host Hotels & Resorts Inc (NASD: HST)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2017.
| Start date: | 11/08/2017 |
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| End date: | 11/07/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $20.19 | ||||
| End price/share: | $17.17 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 495.29 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 566.10 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $2.36 | ||||
| Total return: | -2.80% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -0.57% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $9,718.23 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.57%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $9,718.23 today (as of 11/07/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -2.80% (something to think about: how might HST shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Host Hotels & Resorts Inc paid investors a total of $2.36/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 .48/share, we calculate that HST has a current yield of approximately 2.80%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .48 against the original $20.19/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 13.87%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“I make no attempt to forecast the market; my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.” — Warren Buffett
