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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 Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 04/18/2018
$10,000

04/18/2018
  $6,278

04/17/2023
End date: 04/17/2023
Start price/share: $341.00
End price/share: $205.03
Starting shares: 29.33
Ending shares: 30.62
Dividends reinvested/share: $15.40
Total return: -37.22%
Average annual return: -8.89%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $6,278.13

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -8.89%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $6,278.13 today (as of 04/17/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -37.22% (something to think about: how might BA shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Boeing Co. paid investors a total of $15.40/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 8.22/share, we calculate that BA has a current yield of approximately 4.01%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 8.22 against the original $341.00/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.18%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“You can get in much more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits.” — Benjamin Graham