“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 Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX) back in 2019. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:
| Start date: | 03/19/2019 |
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| End date: | 03/18/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $125.28 | ||||
| End price/share: | $155.41 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 79.82 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 99.56 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $27.39 | ||||
| Total return: | 54.72% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.12% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $15,474.82 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.12%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $15,474.82 today (as of 03/18/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 54.72% (something to think about: how might CVX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Chevron Corporation paid investors a total of $27.39/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 6.52/share, we calculate that CVX has a current yield of approximately 4.20%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.52 against the original $125.28/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.35%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Value investing requires a great deal of hard work, unusually strict discipline, and a long-term investment horizon. Few are willing and able to devote sufficient time and effort to become value investors, and only a fraction of those have the proper mind-set to succeed.” — Seth Klarman
