“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 Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE: BMY)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2019.
| Start date: | 09/16/2019 |
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| End date: | 09/13/2024 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $49.47 | ||||
| End price/share: | $49.13 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 202.14 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 240.43 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $10.41 | ||||
| Total return: | 18.12% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 3.39% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $11,812.80 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.39%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $11,812.80 today (as of 09/13/2024). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 18.12% (something to think about: how might BMY shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Bristol Myers Squibb Co. paid investors a total of $10.41/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 2.4/share, we calculate that BMY has a current yield of approximately 4.88%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 2.4 against the original $49.47/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 9.86%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“If you’re prepared to invest in a company, then you ought to be able to explain why in simple language that a fifth grader could understand, and quickly enough so the fifth grader won’t get bored.” — Peter Lynch
