“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
Such a great quote from Warren Buffett, highlighting the importance of investment time horizon when considering making an investment. In the short run, who knows what the stock market will do? A week or two after buying any given stock, could the entire stock market fall out of bed? Quite possibly! Should that happen, how would you react? It is an excellent question to think about before hitting the buy button.
For investors who take a multi-year time horizon, the important thing is not what happens in the next week or two, but what the result will be over the long haul. Today, we look at the result investors of the year 2018 experienced, who considered an investment in shares of UnitedHealth Group Inc (NYSE: UNH) and decided upon a five year investment time horizon.
| Start date: | 12/21/2018 |
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| End date: | 12/20/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $238.34 | ||||
| End price/share: | $515.93 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 41.96 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 45.20 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.26 | ||||
| Total return: | 133.18% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 18.45% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $23,317.14 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 18.45%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $23,317.14 today (as of 12/20/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 133.18% (something to think about: how might UNH shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 5 years, UnitedHealth Group Inc has paid $28.26/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).
Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 7.52/share, we calculate that UNH has a current yield of approximately 1.46%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 7.52 against the original $238.34/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.61%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“If you’re prepared to invest in a company, then you ought to be able to explain why in simple language that a fifth grader could understand, and quickly enough so the fifth grader won’t get bored.” — Peter Lynch
