“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 Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASD: ATVI)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.
| Start date: | 09/27/2018 |
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| End date: | 09/26/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $82.87 | ||||
| End price/share: | $94.00 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 120.67 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 125.10 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $2.71 | ||||
| Total return: | 17.59% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 3.29% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $11,756.86 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.29%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,756.86 today (as of 09/26/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 17.59% (something to think about: how might ATVI shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Activision Blizzard, Inc. paid investors a total of $2.71/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 .99/share, we calculate that ATVI has a current yield of approximately 1.05%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .99 against the original $82.87/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.27%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“When everyone is going right, look left.” — Sam Zell
