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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 the risk of stock picking is that you will likely buy under-performing companies. Unfortunately, that's been the case for longer term Taylor Wimpey plc (LON:TW.) shareholders, since the share price is down 19% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return of around 14%. Shareholders have had an even rougher run lately, with the share price down 11% in the last 90 days. We note that the company has reported results fairly recently; and the market is hardly delighted. You can check out the latest numbers in our company report.
After losing 5.0% this past week, it's worth investigating the company's fundamentals to see what we can infer from past performance.
To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. 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.
Taylor Wimpey saw its EPS decline at a compound rate of 26% per year, over the last three years. This fall in the EPS is worse than the 7% compound annual share price fall. This suggests that the market retains some optimism around long term earnings stability, despite past EPS declines.
You can see how EPS has changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).
It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on Taylor Wimpey's earnings, revenue and cash flow.
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, Taylor Wimpey's TSR for the last 3 years was 3.3%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!
A Different Perspective
Taylor Wimpey shareholders are down 12% for the year (even including dividends), but the market itself is up 10.0%. 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. On the bright side, long term shareholders have made money, with a gain of 3% per year over half a decade. If the fundamental data continues to indicate long term sustainable growth, the current sell-off could be an opportunity worth considering. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Taylor Wimpey better, we need to consider many other factors. For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for Taylor Wimpey (1 doesn't sit too well with us) that you should be aware of.