“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 Micron Technology Inc. (NASD: MU)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.
| Start date: | 01/08/2020 |
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| End date: | 01/07/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $57.52 | ||||
| End price/share: | $101.91 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 173.85 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 177.62 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $1.56 | ||||
| Total return: | 81.01% | ||||
| Average annual return: | 12.59% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $18,098.40 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 12.59%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $18,098.40 today (as of 01/07/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 81.01% (something to think about: how might MU shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Micron Technology Inc. paid investors a total of $1.56/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 .46/share, we calculate that MU has a current yield of approximately 0.45%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .46 against the original $57.52/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 0.78%.
More investment wisdom to ponder:
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.” — Charlie Munger
