“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 Pfizer Inc (NYSE: PFE)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2021.
| Start date: | 01/07/2021 |
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| End date: | 01/06/2026 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $37.06 | ||||
| End price/share: | $25.43 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 269.83 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 344.65 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.20 | ||||
| Total return: | -12.36% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -2.60% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $8,765.87 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -2.60%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $8,765.87 today (as of 01/06/2026). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -12.36% (something to think about: how might PFE shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Pfizer Inc paid investors a total of $8.20/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 1.72/share, we calculate that PFE has a current yield of approximately 6.76%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.72 against the original $37.06/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 18.24%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings.” — Peter Lynch
