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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 Western Digital Corp (NASD: WDC)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 05/10/2018
$10,000

05/10/2018
  $4,603

05/09/2023
End date: 05/09/2023
Start price/share: $79.04
End price/share: $33.60
Starting shares: 126.52
Ending shares: 137.01
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.00
Total return: -53.97%
Average annual return: -14.37%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $4,603.94

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -14.37%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $4,603.94 today (as of 05/09/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -53.97% (something to think about: how might WDC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Western Digital Corp paid investors a total of $4.00/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 2/share, we calculate that WDC has a current yield of approximately 5.95%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $79.04/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.53%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I’ve made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.” — Jim Rogers