“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2018, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Williams Cos Inc (NYSE: WMB), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 04/03/2018 |
|
|||
| End date: | 03/31/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $24.45 | ||||
| End price/share: | $29.86 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 409.00 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 562.03 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.93 | ||||
| Total return: | 67.82% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.92% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,780.41 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.92%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,780.41 today (as of 03/31/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 67.82% (something to think about: how might WMB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Williams Cos Inc paid investors a total of $7.93/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 1.79/share, we calculate that WMB has a current yield of approximately 5.99%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.79 against the original $24.45/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 24.50%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” — Woody Allen
