Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

“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 Duke Energy Corp (NYSE: DUK)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 05/01/2018
$10,000

05/01/2018
  $15,231

04/28/2023
End date: 04/28/2023
Start price/share: $79.83
End price/share: $98.88
Starting shares: 125.27
Ending shares: 154.01
Dividends reinvested/share: $19.20
Total return: 52.29%
Average annual return: 8.79%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $15,231.56

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.79%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $15,231.56 today (as of 04/28/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 52.29% (something to think about: how might DUK shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Duke Energy Corp paid investors a total of $19.20/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 4.02/share, we calculate that DUK has a current yield of approximately 4.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.02 against the original $79.83/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.10%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.” — Benjamin Graham