“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 Fidelity National Information Services Inc (NYSE: FIS)? Today, we examine the outcome of a five year investment into the stock back in 2020.
| Start date: | 11/24/2020 |
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| End date: | 11/21/2025 | ||||
| Start price/share: | $148.92 | ||||
| End price/share: | $64.07 | ||||
| Starting shares: | 67.15 | ||||
| Ending shares: | 74.83 | ||||
| Dividends reinvested/share: | $8.51 | ||||
| Total return: | -52.06% | ||||
| Average annual return: | -13.69% | ||||
| Starting investment: | $10,000.00 | ||||
| Ending investment: | $4,793.54 | ||||
As we can see, the five year investment result worked out poorly, with an annualized rate of return of -13.69%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 5 years ago into $4,793.54 today (as of 11/21/2025). On a total return basis, that’s a result of -52.06% (something to think about: how might FIS shares perform over the next 5 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]
Notice that Fidelity National Information Services Inc paid investors a total of $8.51/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 1.6/share, we calculate that FIS has a current yield of approximately 2.50%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.6 against the original $148.92/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 1.68%.
Another great investment quote to think about:
“In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.” — Benjamin Graham
