Passive investing in an index fund is a good way to ensure your own returns roughly match the overall market. Active investors aim to buy stocks that vastly outperform the market - but in the process, they risk under-performance. For example, the MA Financial Group Limited (ASX:MAF) share price is down 39% in the last year. That falls noticeably short of the market decline of around 1.9%. On the bright side, the stock is actually up 15% in the last three years. Even worse, it's down 33% in about a month, which isn't fun at all. Importantly, this could be a market reaction to the recently released financial results. You can check out the latest numbers in our company report.

If the past week is anything to go by, investor sentiment for MA Financial Group isn't positive, so let's see if there's a mismatch between fundamentals and the share price.

See our latest analysis for MA Financial Group

There is no denying that markets are sometimes efficient, but prices do not always reflect underlying business performance. 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.

Even though the MA Financial Group share price is down over the year, its EPS actually improved. It could be that the share price was previously over-hyped.

It's fair to say that the share price does not seem to be reflecting the EPS growth. But we might find some different metrics explain the share price movements better.

MA Financial Group's revenue is actually up 160% over the last year. Since the fundamental metrics don't readily explain the share price drop, there might be an opportunity if the market has overreacted.

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. If you are thinking of buying or selling MA Financial Group stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts.

A Different Perspective

While the broader market lost about 1.9% in the twelve months, MA Financial Group shareholders did even worse, losing 38% (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 3% 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. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. Case in point: We've spotted 5 warning signs for MA Financial Group you should be aware of, and 1 of them can't be ignored.