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These days it's easy to simply buy an index fund, and your returns should (roughly) match the market. But one can do better than that by picking better than average stocks (as part of a diversified portfolio). To wit, the Oportun Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:OPRT) share price is 97% higher than it was a year ago, much better than the market return of around 12% (not including dividends) in the same period. That's a solid performance by our standards! Unfortunately the longer term returns are not so good, with the stock falling 42% in the last three years.
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Since the stock has added US$61m to its market cap in the past week alone, let's see if underlying performance has been driving long-term returns.
Oportun Financial isn't currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. Generally speaking, companies without profits are expected to grow revenue every year, and at a good clip. Some companies are willing to postpone profitability to grow revenue faster, but in that case one would hope for good top-line growth to make up for the lack of earnings.
Oportun Financial actually shrunk its revenue over the last year, with a reduction of 13%. Despite the lack of revenue growth, the stock has returned a solid 97% the last twelve months. We can correlate the share price rise with revenue or profit growth, but it seems the market had previously expected weaker results, and sentiment around the stock is improving.
The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).
We consider it positive that insiders have made significant purchases in the last year. Even so, future earnings will be far more important to whether current shareholders make money. So we recommend checking out this free report showing consensus forecasts
A Different Perspective
It's good to see that Oportun Financial has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 97% in the last twelve months. Notably the five-year annualised TSR loss of 8% per year compares very unfavourably with the recent share price performance. The long term loss makes us cautious, but the short term TSR gain certainly hints at a brighter future. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Oportun Financial better, we need to consider many other factors. Even so, be aware that Oportun Financial is showing 3 warning signs in our investment analysis , you should know about...