“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 Ralph Lauren Corp (NYSE: RL)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.
| Start date: | 08/28/2019 |
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| End date: | 08/27/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $87.74 | ||||
| End price/share: | $172.45 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 113.97 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 126.36 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $11.64 | ||||
| Total return: | 117.91% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 16.85% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $21,793.59 | ||||
As shown above, the five year investment result worked out exceptionally well, with an annualized rate of return of 16.85%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $21,793.59 today (as of 08/27/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 117.91% (something to think about: how might RL shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Ralph Lauren Corp paid investors a total of $11.64/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 3.3/share, we calculate that RL has a current yield of approximately 1.91%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 3.3 against the original $87.74/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 2.18%.
One more investment quote to leave you with:
“Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.” — Seth Klarman
