“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 General Mills Inc (NYSE: GIS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.
| Start date: | 04/16/2020 |
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| End date: | 04/15/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $60.69 | ||||
| End price/share: | $57.85 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 164.77 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 194.29 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $10.98 | ||||
| Total return: | 12.40% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 2.36% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $11,237.03 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 2.36%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,237.03 today (as of 04/15/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 12.40% (something to think about: how might GIS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that General Mills Inc paid investors a total of $10.98/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 2.4/share, we calculate that GIS has a current yield of approximately 4.15%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.4 against the original $60.69/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 6.84%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.” — John Maynard Keynes
