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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 Franklin Resources Inc (NYSE: BEN)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 05/17/2018
$10,000

05/17/2018
  $8,662

05/16/2023
End date: 05/16/2023
Start price/share: $34.04
End price/share: $24.02
Starting shares: 293.77
Ending shares: 360.58
Dividends reinvested/share: $5.46
Total return: -13.39%
Average annual return: -2.83%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $8,662.85

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -2.83%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,662.85 today (as of 05/16/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -13.39% (something to think about: how might BEN shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Franklin Resources Inc paid investors a total of $5.46/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 1.2/share, we calculate that BEN has a current yield of approximately 5.00%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.2 against the original $34.04/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 14.69%.

One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” — John Maynard Keynes