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 AT&T Inc (NYSE: T)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.

Start date: 11/16/2018
$10,000

11/16/2018
  $9,582

11/15/2023
End date: 11/15/2023
Start price/share: $22.88
End price/share: $15.76
Starting shares: 437.06
Ending shares: 607.99
Dividends reinvested/share: $7.02
Total return: -4.18%
Average annual return: -0.85%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $9,582.16

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.85%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $9,582.16 today (as of 11/15/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -4.18% (something to think about: how might T shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that AT&T Inc paid investors a total of $7.02/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 1.11/share, we calculate that T has a current yield of approximately 7.04%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.11 against the original $22.88/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 30.77%.

Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep.” — Robert Kiyosaki