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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. At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in Asset Plus Limited (NZSE:APL), since the last five years saw the share price fall 55%. In contrast, the stock price has popped 9.8% in the last thirty days.
Since shareholders are down over the longer term, lets look at the underlying fundamentals over the that time and see if they've been consistent with returns.
Check out our latest analysis for Asset Plus
While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. One way to examine how market sentiment has changed over time is to look at the interaction between a company's share price and its earnings per share (EPS).
Asset Plus became profitable within the last five years. Most would consider that to be a good thing, so it's counter-intuitive to see the share price declining. Other metrics might give us a better handle on how its value is changing over time.
It could be that the revenue decline of 5.3% per year is viewed as evidence that Asset Plus is shrinking. That could explain the weak share price.
You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).
We know that Asset Plus has improved its bottom line lately, but what does the future have in store? So we recommend checking out this free report showing consensus forecasts
What About Dividends?
As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). 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. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. We note that for Asset Plus the TSR over the last 5 years was -33%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!
A Different Perspective
While it's certainly disappointing to see that Asset Plus shares lost 6.0% throughout the year, that wasn't as bad as the market loss of 8.6%. What is more upsetting is the 6% per annum loss investors have suffered over the last half decade. While the losses are slowing we doubt many shareholders are happy with the stock. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Even so, be aware that Asset Plus is showing 3 warning signs in our investment analysis , and 2 of those are potentially serious...