“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 United Parcel Service Inc (NYSE: UPS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.
| Start date: | 07/21/2020 |
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| End date: | 07/18/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $119.04 | ||||
| End price/share: | $99.22 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 84.01 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 100.76 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $28.46 | ||||
| Total return: | -0.03% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -0.01% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $9,995.01 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -0.01%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $9,995.01 today (as of 07/18/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -0.03% (something to think about: how might UPS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that United Parcel Service Inc paid investors a total of $28.46/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 6.56/share, we calculate that UPS has a current yield of approximately 6.61%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 6.56 against the original $119.04/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.55%.
Here’s one more great investment quote before you go:
“Be fearful when others are greedy; be greedy when others are fearful.” — Warren Buffett
