“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 Mondelez International Inc (NASD: MDLZ) back in 2016: 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: | 11/01/2016 |
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| End date: | 10/29/2021 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $44.40 | ||||
| End price/share: | $60.74 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 225.23 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 250.28 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $5.24 | ||||
| Total return: | 52.02% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 8.75% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $15,203.61 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out well, with an annualized rate of return of 8.75%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $15,203.61 today (as of 10/29/2021). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 52.02% (something to think about: how might MDLZ shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Mondelez International Inc paid investors a total of $5.24/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 1.4/share, we calculate that MDLZ has a current yield of approximately 2.30%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.4 against the original $44.40/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.18%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.” — Benjamin Graham
