“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 US Bancorp (NYSE: USB)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2018.
| Start date: | 12/24/2018 |
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| End date: | 12/21/2023 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $43.76 | ||||
| End price/share: | $43.31 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 228.52 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 277.93 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.71 | ||||
| Total return: | 20.37% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 3.78% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,035.94 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.78%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,035.94 today (as of 12/21/2023). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 20.37% (something to think about: how might USB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that US Bancorp paid investors a total of $8.71/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 1.96/share, we calculate that USB has a current yield of approximately 4.53%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.96 against the original $43.76/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 10.35%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.” — Pablo Picasso
