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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 Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.

Start date: 10/29/2019
$10,000

10/29/2019
  $4,370

10/28/2024
End date: 10/28/2024
Start price/share: $348.93
End price/share: $150.69
Starting shares: 28.66
Ending shares: 29.00
Dividends reinvested/share: $4.11
Total return: -56.30%
Average annual return: -15.25%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $4,370.20

As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -15.25%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $4,370.20 today (as of 10/28/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -56.30% (something to think about: how might BA shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Boeing Co. paid investors a total of $4.11/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 8.22/share, we calculate that BA has a current yield of approximately 5.45%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 8.22 against the original $348.93/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.56%.

One more investment quote to leave you with:
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep.” — Robert Kiyosaki