“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 Match Group Inc (NASD: MTCH)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.
| Start date: | 05/12/2020 |
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| End date: | 05/09/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $67.86 | ||||
| End price/share: | $27.18 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 147.36 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 149.13 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $0.38 | ||||
| Total return: | -59.47% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -16.54% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $4,053.43 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -16.54%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $4,053.43 today (as of 05/09/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -59.47% (something to think about: how might MTCH shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Match Group Inc paid investors a total of $0.38/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 .76/share, we calculate that MTCH has a current yield of approximately 2.80%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .76 against the original $67.86/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.13%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” — George Soros
