In order to justify the effort of selecting individual stocks, it's worth striving to beat the returns from a market index fund. But every investor is virtually certain to have both over-performing and under-performing stocks. So we wouldn't blame long term SOHO China Limited (HKG:410) shareholders for doubting their decision to hold, with the stock down 59% over a half decade. And some of the more recent buyers are probably worried, too, with the stock falling 25% in the last year. Shareholders have had an even rougher run lately, with the share price down 16% in the last 90 days. However, one could argue that the price has been influenced by the general market, which is down 7.8% in the same timeframe.

Check out our latest analysis for SOHO China

To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

Looking back five years, both SOHO China's share price and EPS declined; the latter at a rate of 30% per year. This fall in the EPS is worse than the 16% compound annual share price fall. So investors might expect EPS to bounce back -- or they may have previously foreseen the EPS decline.

The graphic below depicts how EPS has changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

This free interactive report on SOHO China's earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

What About Dividends?

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. In the case of SOHO China, it has a TSR of -22% for the last 5 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

A Different Perspective

While the broader market lost about 7.2% in the twelve months, SOHO China shareholders did even worse, losing 24% (even including dividends) . However, it could simply be that the share price has been impacted by broader market jitters. It might be worth keeping an eye on the fundamentals, in case there's a good opportunity. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 4.9% over the last half decade. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. Is SOHO China cheap compared to other companies? These 3 valuation measures might help you decide.