“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
Investors can learn a lot from Warren Buffett, whose above quote teaches the importance of thinking about investment time horizon, and asking ourselves before buying any given stock: can we envision holding onto it for years — even a five year holding period possibly?
Suppose a “buy-and-hold” investor was considering an investment into Cisco Systems Inc (NASD: CSCO) back in 2020: back then, such an investor may have been pondering this very same question. Had they answered “yes” to a full five year investment time horizon and then actually held for these past 5 years, here’s how that investment would have turned out.
| Start date: | 07/22/2020 |
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| End date: | 07/21/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $46.90 | ||||
| End price/share: | $68.34 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 213.22 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 248.00 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $7.70 | ||||
| Total return: | 69.48% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 11.13% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $16,949.49 | ||||
The above analysis shows the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 11.13%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $16,949.49 today (as of 07/21/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 69.48% (something to think about: how might CSCO shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Cisco Systems Inc paid investors a total of $7.70/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 1.64/share, we calculate that CSCO has a current yield of approximately 2.40%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.64 against the original $46.90/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.12%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.” — William Feather
