Ideally, your overall portfolio should beat the market average. But every investor is virtually certain to have both over-performing and under-performing stocks. At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in GuocoLand Limited (SGX:F17), since the last five years saw the share price fall 27%.

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.

See our latest analysis for GuocoLand

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).

While the share price declined over five years, GuocoLand actually managed to increase EPS by an average of 0.1% 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 possibly, the market was previously very optimistic, so the stock has disappointed, despite improving EPS.

By glancing at these numbers, we'd posit that the the market had expectations of much higher growth, five years ago. Looking to other metrics might better explain the share price change.

Arguably, the revenue drop of 6.9% a year for half a decade suggests that the company can't grow in the long term. That could explain the weak share price.

The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

We know that GuocoLand has improved its bottom line lately, but what does the future have in store? So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think GuocoLand will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).

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. In the case of GuocoLand, it has a TSR of -12% for the last 5 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

It's good to see that GuocoLand has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 3.3% in the last twelve months. And that does include the dividend. There's no doubt those recent returns are much better than the TSR loss of 2% per year over five years. We generally put more weight on the long term performance over the short term, but the recent improvement could hint at a (positive) inflection point within the business. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand GuocoLand better, we need to consider many other factors. Even so, be aware that GuocoLand is showing 4 warning signs in our investment analysis , and 2 of those don't sit too well with us...