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Stockland (ASX:SGP) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 11% in the last month. But that doesn't change the fact that the returns over the last three years have been less than pleasing. In fact, the share price is down 27% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return.
Now let's have a look at the company's fundamentals, and see if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.
View our latest analysis for Stockland
While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.
During the unfortunate three years of share price decline, Stockland actually saw its earnings per share (EPS) improve by 67% per year. Given the share price reaction, one might suspect that EPS is not a good guide to the business performance during the period (perhaps due to a one-off loss or gain). Or else the company was over-hyped in the past, and so its growth has disappointed.
It's worth taking a look at other metrics, because the EPS growth doesn't seem to match with the falling share price.
It's quite likely that the declining dividend has caused some investors to sell their shares, pushing the price lower in the process. It doesn't seem like the changes in revenue would have impacted the share price much, but a closer inspection of the data might reveal something.
The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil 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. This free report showing analyst forecasts should help you form a view on Stockland
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. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Stockland's TSR for the last 3 years was -12%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.