“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 Hormel Foods Corp. (NYSE: HRL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.
| Start date: | 08/11/2020 |
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| End date: | 08/08/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $51.41 | ||||
| End price/share: | $28.48 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 194.51 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 223.76 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.36 | ||||
| Total return: | -36.27% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -8.63% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $6,371.37 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -8.63%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $6,371.37 today (as of 08/08/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -36.27% (something to think about: how might HRL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Hormel Foods Corp. paid investors a total of $5.36/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 1.16/share, we calculate that HRL has a current yield of approximately 4.07%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.16 against the original $51.41/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 7.92%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.” — Peter Lynch
