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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 Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc (NYSE: ARE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 04/02/2018
$10,000

04/02/2018
  $11,511

03/29/2023
End date: 03/29/2023
Start price/share: $121.79
End price/share: $123.03
Starting shares: 82.11
Ending shares: 93.58
Dividends reinvested/share: $20.27
Total return: 15.13%
Average annual return: 2.86%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $11,511.50

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.86%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,511.50 today (as of 03/29/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 15.13% (something to think about: how might ARE shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc paid investors a total of $20.27/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 4.84/share, we calculate that ARE has a current yield of approximately 3.93%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.84 against the original $121.79/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.23%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“All intelligent investing is value investing: acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.” — Charlie Munger