These days it's easy to simply buy an index fund, and your returns should (roughly) match the market. But you can significantly boost your returns by picking above-average stocks. For example, the Fonix Mobile plc (LON:FNX) share price is up 29% in the last 1 year, clearly besting the market decline of around 8.4% (not including dividends). If it can keep that out-performance up over the long term, investors will do very well! Note that businesses generally develop over the long term, so the returns over the last year might not reflect a long term trend.

So let's investigate and see if the longer term performance of the company has been in line with the underlying business' progress.

View our latest analysis for Fonix Mobile

While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

Fonix Mobile was able to grow EPS by 28% in the last twelve months. We note that the earnings per share growth isn't far from the share price growth (of 29%). So this implies that investor expectations of the company have remained pretty steady. It makes intuitive sense that the share price and EPS would grow at similar rates.

The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

It's probably worth noting that the CEO is paid less than the median at similar sized companies. But while CEO remuneration is always worth checking, the really important question is whether the company can grow earnings going forward. This free interactive report on Fonix Mobile's earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). The TSR incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. We note that for Fonix Mobile the TSR over the last 1 year was 34%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that Fonix Mobile shareholders have gained 34% over the last year, including dividends. And the share price momentum remains respectable, with a gain of 7.2% in the last three months. This suggests the company is continuing to win over new investors. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Fonix Mobile better, we need to consider many other factors. Case in point: We've spotted 1 warning sign for Fonix Mobile you should be aware of.