“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
The above quote from Warren Buffett is timeless, and brings into focus the choice about time horizon that any investor should think about before buying a stock they are considering. Behind every stock is an actual business; what will that business look like over a five year period?
Today, let’s look backwards in time to 2020, and take a look at what happened to investors who asked that very question about Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc (NYSE: TMO), by taking a look at the investment outcome over a five year holding period.
| Start date: | 03/05/2020 |
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| End date: | 03/04/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $312.89 | ||||
| End price/share: | $516.57 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 31.96 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 32.34 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $6.08 | ||||
| Total return: | 67.08% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 10.81% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,706.86 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 10.81%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,706.86 today (as of 03/04/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 67.08% (something to think about: how might TMO shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc paid investors a total of $6.08/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 1.72/share, we calculate that TMO has a current yield of approximately 0.33%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.72 against the original $312.89/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.11%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Finding the best person or the best organization to invest your money is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make.” — Bill Gross
