If you had bought $1,000 worth of (NYSE: PFE) shares five years ago, how much would that be worth today? The answer will strike you as terrific or terrible: $840.

That answer will be terrible if you did buy into Pfizer then as it reflects a loss, not a gain -- of about 16% -- yikes! Annualized, that's an average loss of 3.4% per year. The loss is even worse if you did what we often recommend doing: reinvesting your dividends into additional shares of stock. If you plowed Pfizer's not-insignificant dividends into more shares of Pfizer, your overall loss would have been 21%, leaving you with about $790. Ouch. (Note that, of course, you can always reinvest dividend income into shares of any stock, such as one you're most bullish on.)

Meanwhile, that answer -- a loss of 16% or 21% -- could be terrific if you didn't buy into Pfizer in 2019 but want to do so now. That's because the stock, after such a drop, now looks quite attractively valued. Its recent price-to-sales ratio, for example, was 2.5, well below the five-year average of 3.4. On top of that, Pfizer is a dividend-paying stock, with a whopping recent dividend yield of 6.5%.

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Source Fool.com