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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 Halliburton Company (NYSE: HAL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 07/12/2018
$10,000

07/12/2018
  $9,178

07/11/2023
End date: 07/11/2023
Start price/share: $44.92
End price/share: $37.52
Starting shares: 222.62
Ending shares: 244.66
Dividends reinvested/share: $2.38
Total return: -8.20%
Average annual return: -1.70%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $9,178.41

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -1.70%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $9,178.41 today (as of 07/11/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -8.20% (something to think about: how might HAL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Halliburton Company paid investors a total of $2.38/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 .64/share, we calculate that HAL has a current yield of approximately 1.71%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .64 against the original $44.92/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.81%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” — Phillip Fisher