“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 Ecolab Inc (NYSE: ECL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2017.
| Start date: | 12/28/2017 |
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| End date: | 12/27/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $134.53 | ||||
| End price/share: | $145.45 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 74.33 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 78.41 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $9.44 | ||||
| Total return: | 14.05% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.66% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $11,402.66 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.66%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,402.66 today (as of 12/27/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 14.05% (something to think about: how might ECL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Ecolab Inc paid investors a total of $9.44/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 2.12/share, we calculate that ECL has a current yield of approximately 1.46%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.12 against the original $134.53/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.09%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“We ignore outlooks and forecasts… we’re lousy at it and we admit it … everyone else is lousy too, but most people won’t admit it.” — Martin Whitman
