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COG Financial Services Limited (ASX:COG) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 20% in the last quarter. But that doesn't help the fact that the three year return is less impressive. In fact, the share price is down 30% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return.
View our latest analysis for COG Financial Services
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).
COG Financial Services became profitable within the last five years. On the other hand, it reported a trailing twelve months loss, suggesting it isn't reliably profitable. Other metrics might give us a better handle on how its value is changing over time.
The modest 2.0% dividend yield is unlikely to be guiding the market view of the stock. We note that, in three years, revenue has actually grown at a 25% annual rate, so that doesn't seem to be a reason to sell shares. This analysis is just perfunctory, but it might be worth researching COG Financial Services more closely, as sometimes stocks fall unfairly. This could present an opportunity.
You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover 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. This free interactive report on COG Financial Services' earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.
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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. In the case of COG Financial Services, it has a TSR of -28% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.
A Different Perspective
While the broader market gained around 3.8% in the last year, COG Financial Services shareholders lost 9.3% (even including dividends). Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 4% over the last half decade. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should "buy when there is blood on the streets", but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand COG Financial Services better, we need to consider many other factors. Like risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 3 warning signs for COG Financial Services (of which 1 can't be ignored!) you should know about.