“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 AT&T Inc (NYSE: T)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.
| Start date: | 01/03/2018 |
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| End date: | 12/30/2022 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $28.44 | ||||
| End price/share: | $18.41 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 351.62 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 485.41 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.42 | ||||
| Total return: | -10.64% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -2.23% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $8,935.29 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -2.23%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,935.29 today (as of 12/30/2022). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -10.64% (something to think about: how might T shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that AT&T Inc paid investors a total of $7.42/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 1.11/share, we calculate that T has a current yield of approximately 6.03%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.11 against the original $28.44/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 21.20%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Sentimentality about an investments leads to lack of discipline.” — Sam Zell
