“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Cintas Corporation (NASD: CTAS) back in 2018: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 04/16/2018 |
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| End date: | 04/13/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $172.91 | ||||
| End price/share: | $459.78 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 57.83 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 60.99 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $16.86 | ||||
| Total return: | 180.40% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 22.93% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $28,041.30 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 22.93%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $28,041.30 today (as of 04/13/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 180.40% (something to think about: how might CTAS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Cintas Corporation paid investors a total of $16.86/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 4.6/share, we calculate that CTAS has a current yield of approximately 1.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.6 against the original $172.91/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.58%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If you are not willing to own a stock for 10 years, do not even think about owning it for 10 minutes.” — Warren Buffett
