“I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
One of the most important things investors can learn from Warren Buffett, is about how they approach their time horizon for an investment into a stock under consideration. Because immediately after buying shares of a given stock, investors will then be able to check on the day-to-day (and even minute-by-minute) market value. Some days the stock market will be up, other days down. These daily fluctuations can often distract from the long-term view. Today, we look at the result of a five year holding period for an investor who was considering General Mills Inc (NYSE: GIS) back in 2015, bought the stock, ignored the market’s ups and downs, and simply held through to today.
| Start date: | 06/24/2015 |
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| End date: | 06/23/2020 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $56.55 | ||||
| End price/share: | $61.00 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 176.83 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 211.47 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $9.58 | ||||
| Total return: | 28.99% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 5.22% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $12,898.88 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 5.22%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $12,898.88 today (as of 06/23/2020). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 28.99% (something to think about: how might GIS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that General Mills Inc paid investors a total of $9.58/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 1.96/share, we calculate that GIS has a current yield of approximately 3.21%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.96 against the original $56.55/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.68%.
One more piece of investment wisdom to leave you with:
“A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. You need to keep raw, irrational emotion under control.” — Charlie Munger
