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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 BorgWarner Inc (NYSE: BWA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 02/23/2018
$10,000

02/23/2018
  $10,344

02/22/2023
End date: 02/22/2023
Start price/share: $52.32
End price/share: $49.74
Starting shares: 191.13
Ending shares: 207.94
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.40
Total return: 3.43%
Average annual return: 0.68%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $10,344.66

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 0.68%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $10,344.66 today (as of 02/22/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 3.43% (something to think about: how might BWA shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that BorgWarner Inc paid investors a total of $3.40/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 .68/share, we calculate that BWA has a current yield of approximately 1.37%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .68 against the original $52.32/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.62%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.” — George Soros