“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
This inspiring quote from Warren Buffett teaches us the importance of considering our investment time horizon when approaching any given investment: Could we envision ourselves holding the stock we are considering for many years? Even a five year holding period potentially?
For “buy-and-hold” investors taking a long-term view, what’s important isn’t the short-term stock market fluctuations that will inevitably occur, but what happens over the long haul. Looking back 5 years to 2020, investors considering an investment into shares of Williams Cos Inc (NYSE: WMB) may have been pondering this very question and thinking about their potential investment result over a full five year time horizon. Here’s how that would have worked out.
| Start date: | 06/26/2020 |
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| End date: | 06/25/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $18.51 | ||||
| End price/share: | $60.69 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 540.25 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 707.16 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.83 | ||||
| Total return: | 329.17% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 33.82% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $42,914.61 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 33.82%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $42,914.61 today (as of 06/25/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 329.17% (something to think about: how might WMB shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Williams Cos Inc paid investors a total of $8.83/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/share, we calculate that WMB has a current yield of approximately 3.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2 against the original $18.51/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 17.83%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“All the opportunity in the world means nothing if you don’t actually pull the trigger.” — Sam Zell
