Investors can approximate the average market return by buying an index fund. But if you buy individual stocks, you can do both better or worse than that. Unfortunately the Ecora Resources PLC (LON:ECOR) share price slid 25% over twelve months. That falls noticeably short of the market decline of around 3.7%. However, the longer term returns haven't been so bad, with the stock down 1.2% in the last three years. But it's up 6.1% in the last week. But this could be related to the strong market, with stocks up around 3.0% in the same time.
So let's have a look and see if the longer term performance of the company has been in line with the underlying business' progress.
Check out our latest analysis for Ecora Resources
While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.
Even though the Ecora Resources share price is down over the year, its EPS actually improved. It could be that the share price was previously over-hyped.
The divergence between the EPS and the share price is quite notable, during the year. But we might find some different metrics explain the share price movements better.
Ecora Resources' dividend seems healthy to us, so we doubt that the yield is a concern for the market. From what we can see, revenue is pretty flat, so that doesn't really explain the share price drop. Of course, it could simply be that it simply fell short of the market consensus expectations.
You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).
It's good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That's a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. So we recommend checking out this free report showing consensus forecasts
What About Dividends?
It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. 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. As it happens, Ecora Resources' TSR for the last 1 year was -21%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.