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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 KKR & CO Inc (NYSE: KKR)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.

Start date: 11/01/2019
$10,000

11/01/2019
  $49,694

10/31/2024
End date: 10/31/2024
Start price/share: $29.46
End price/share: $138.24
Starting shares: 339.44
Ending shares: 359.50
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.00
Total return: 396.97%
Average annual return: 37.78%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $49,694.95

As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 37.78%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $49,694.95 today (as of 10/31/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 396.97% (something to think about: how might KKR shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that KKR & CO Inc paid investors a total of $3.00/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 .7/share, we calculate that KKR has a current yield of approximately 0.51%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .7 against the original $29.46/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.73%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“The right time for a company to finance its growth is not when it needs capital, but rather when the market is most receptive to providing capital.” — Michael Milken