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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 wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?

A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a five year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Albemarle Corp. (NYSE: ALB) back in 2018. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 03/20/2018
$10,000

03/20/2018
  $23,344

03/17/2023
End date: 03/17/2023
Start price/share: $95.32
End price/share: $208.49
Starting shares: 104.91
Ending shares: 111.96
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.56
Total return: 133.42%
Average annual return: 18.50%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $23,344.67

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.50%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $23,344.67 today (as of 03/17/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 133.42% (something to think about: how might ALB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Albemarle Corp. paid investors a total of $7.56/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 1.6/share, we calculate that ALB has a current yield of approximately 0.77%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.6 against the original $95.32/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.81%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Cash is a fact, profit is an opinion.” — Alfred Rappaport