“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 Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) 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: | 09/09/2019 |
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| End date: | 09/06/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $102.17 | ||||
| End price/share: | $128.14 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 97.88 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 120.66 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $19.50 | ||||
| Total return: | 54.62% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 9.11% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $15,460.34 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 9.11%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $15,460.34 today (as of 09/06/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 54.62% (something to think about: how might PSX shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Phillips 66 paid investors a total of $19.50/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 4.6/share, we calculate that PSX has a current yield of approximately 3.59%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 4.6 against the original $102.17/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 3.51%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.” — Benjamin Graham
