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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 PACCAR Inc. (NASD: PCAR)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.

Start date: 07/11/2019
$10,000

07/11/2019
  $25,950

07/10/2024
End date: 07/10/2024
Start price/share: $47.19
End price/share: $101.50
Starting shares: 211.91
Ending shares: 255.71
Dividends reinvested/share: $12.78
Total return: 159.54%
Average annual return: 21.00%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $25,950.97

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 21.00%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $25,950.97 today (as of 07/10/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 159.54% (something to think about: how might PCAR shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that PACCAR Inc. paid investors a total of $12.78/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 1.2/share, we calculate that PCAR has a current yield of approximately 1.18%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.2 against the original $47.19/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.50%.

More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Smart investing doesn’t consist of buying good assets but of buying assets well. This is a very, very important distinction that very, very few people understand.” — Howard Marks