“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a five year holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 5 years to 2019, investors considering an investment into shares of Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE: WFC) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full five year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 04/03/2019 |
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| End date: | 04/02/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $48.86 | ||||
| End price/share: | $57.35 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 204.67 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 236.38 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.04 | ||||
| Total return: | 35.57% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 6.27% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $13,555.82 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 6.27%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $13,555.82 today (as of 04/02/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 35.57% (something to think about: how might WFC shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Wells Fargo & Co paid investors a total of $6.04/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 1.4/share, we calculate that WFC has a current yield of approximately 2.44%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.4 against the original $48.86/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.99%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Investors should purchase stocks like they purchase groceries, not like they purchase perfume.” — Benjamin Graham
