“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 American Tower Corp (NYSE: AMT)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.
| Start date: | 04/30/2019 |
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| End date: | 04/29/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $195.30 | ||||
| End price/share: | $174.99 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 51.20 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 57.74 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $26.55 | ||||
| Total return: | 1.04% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 0.21% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $10,105.50 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 0.21%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $10,105.50 today (as of 04/29/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 1.04% (something to think about: how might AMT shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that American Tower Corp paid investors a total of $26.55/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 6.48/share, we calculate that AMT has a current yield of approximately 3.70%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.48 against the original $195.30/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.89%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” — Warren Buffett
