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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. For example, the DFS Furniture plc (LON:DFS) share price is down 44% in the last year. That contrasts poorly with the market decline of 4.7%. Notably, shareholders had a tough run over the longer term, too, with a drop of 33% in the last three years. Furthermore, it's down 16% in about a quarter. That's not much fun for holders.
Given the past week has been tough on shareholders, let's investigate the fundamentals and see what we can learn.
Check out our latest analysis for DFS Furniture
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).
DFS Furniture managed to increase earnings per share from a loss to a profit, over the last 12 months.
Earnings per share growth rates aren't particularly useful for comparing with the share price, when a company has moved from loss to profit. So it makes sense to check out some other factors.
DFS Furniture's dividend seems healthy to us, so we doubt that the yield is a concern for the market. The revenue trend doesn't seem to explain why the share price is down. Of course, it could simply be that it simply fell short of the market consensus expectations.
You can see how earnings and revenue have changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).
We like that insiders have been buying shares in the last twelve months. Having said that, most people consider earnings and revenue growth trends to be a more meaningful guide to the business. So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think DFS Furniture will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).
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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. As it happens, DFS Furniture's TSR for the last 1 year was -38%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!