The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd (ASX: ANZ) share price has travelled sideways over the course of the last few years.
This has led investors to believe that the banking giant is now fully valued, trading at the same levels pre-COVID-19.
Below, we calculate if the dividends have been worth the wait if a shareholder made an investment 3 years ago.
What if you had invested $10,000 in ANZ shares 3 years ago?
If you had invested $10,000 in ANZ shares on this day 3 years ago, you would have bought them for around $26.52 each. This would have given you approximately 377 shares without factoring in any dividend reinvestments over the years.
Fast-forward to today, the current ANZ share price is $27.58. This means those 377 shares would now be worth around $10,397.66. When considering percentage terms, this implies a gain of just 3.9% or an average return of 0.39% per year. This is considerably less than what the standard inflation rate is, which means your money would be worth less than this time 3 years ago.
In contrast, the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) has returned a yearly average of 5.62% to shareholders in the past 3 years.
And the dividends?
Over the course of the last 3 years, ANZ has made a total of 6 bi-annual dividend payments from July 2019 to December 2021.
Adding those 6 dividend payments gives us an amount of $3.62 per share. Calculating the number of shares owned against the total dividend payment gives us a figure of $1,364.74.
When putting both the initial investment gains and dividend distribution, an investor would have made roughly $11,762.40.
In comparison, investing the same amount in the ASX 200 would have netted you a total figure of $11,844.11.
As you can see, investing in the ASX 200 would have given you a slightly better return than parking your money in ANZ. And that's even including the dividend payments.
No doubt, it pays off to research a company's products/services, financial statements, projections, competitive moat and market trends before investing.
ANZ share price snapshot
Over the past 12 months, the ANZ share price has shed around 2% driven by tough trading conditions.
Its shares hit a 52-week low of $24.65 on 8 March, before quickly rebounding to the mid $27 mark.
Based on the current share price, ANZ commands a market capitalisation of around $77.32 billion.
