“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?
A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a five year holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Cisco Systems Inc (NASD: CSCO) back in 2018. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 08/24/2018 |
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| End date: | 08/23/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $46.32 | ||||
| End price/share: | $55.98 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 215.89 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 251.05 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.28 | ||||
| Total return: | 40.54% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 7.04% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $14,051.75 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 7.04%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $14,051.75 today (as of 08/23/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 40.54% (something to think about: how might CSCO shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Cisco Systems Inc paid investors a total of $7.28/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 1.56/share, we calculate that CSCO has a current yield of approximately 2.79%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.56 against the original $46.32/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.02%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.” — Benjamin Graham
