Buying shares in the best businesses can build meaningful wealth for you and your family. While not every stock performs well, when investors win, they can win big. Don't believe it? Then look at the BQE Water Inc. (CVE:BQE) share price. It's 544% higher than it was five years ago. If that doesn't get you thinking about long term investing, we don't know what will. We note the stock price is up 1.8% in the last seven days. Anyone who held for that rewarding ride would probably be keen to talk about it.

Now it's worth having a look at the company's fundamentals too, because that will help us determine if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

Check out our latest analysis for BQE Water

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).

During five years of share price growth, BQE Water achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 24% per year. This EPS growth is slower than the share price growth of 45% per year, over the same period. This suggests that market participants hold the company in higher regard, these days. And that's hardly shocking given the track record of growth.

The company's earnings per share (over time) is depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

We consider it positive that insiders have made significant purchases in the last year. Having said that, most people consider earnings and revenue growth trends to be a more meaningful guide to the business. This free interactive report on BQE Water's earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that BQE Water shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 105% over the last year. That's better than the annualised return of 45% over half a decade, implying that the company is doing better recently. Someone with an optimistic perspective could view the recent improvement in TSR as indicating that the business itself is getting better with time. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Even so, be aware that BQE Water is showing 2 warning signs in our investment analysis , you should know about...