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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

Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?

Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Hormel Foods Corp. (NYSE: HRL) back in 2017: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.

Start date: 11/09/2017
$10,000

11/09/2017
  $16,467

11/08/2022
End date: 11/08/2022
Start price/share: $31.95
End price/share: $47.46
Starting shares: 312.99
Ending shares: 346.98
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.54
Total return: 64.68%
Average annual return: 10.49%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $16,467.01

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.49%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,467.01 today (as of 11/08/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 64.68% (something to think about: how might HRL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Hormel Foods Corp. paid investors a total of $4.54/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 1.04/share, we calculate that HRL has a current yield of approximately 2.19%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.04 against the original $31.95/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.85%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“October is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.” — Mark Twain