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“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 CMS Energy Corp (NYSE: CMS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.

Start date: 06/07/2019
$10,000

06/07/2019
  $12,291

06/06/2024
End date: 06/06/2024
Start price/share: $57.79
End price/share: $61.36
Starting shares: 173.04
Ending shares: 200.33
Dividends reinvested/share: $8.96
Total return: 22.92%
Average annual return: 4.21%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $12,291.25

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 4.21%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,291.25 today (as of 06/06/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 22.92% (something to think about: how might CMS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that CMS Energy Corp paid investors a total of $8.96/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 2.06/share, we calculate that CMS has a current yield of approximately 3.36%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.06 against the original $57.79/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.81%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘this time it’s different.'” — Sir John Templeton