The main aim of stock picking is to find the market-beating stocks. But the main game is to find enough winners to more than offset the losers At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in Concurrent Technologies Plc (LON:CNC), since the last five years saw the share price fall 12%.

With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

View our latest analysis for Concurrent Technologies

In his essay The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville Warren Buffett described how share prices do not always rationally reflect the value of a business. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

Looking back five years, both Concurrent Technologies' share price and EPS declined; the latter at a rate of 6.8% per year. This fall in the EPS is worse than the 2% compound annual share price fall. The relatively muted share price reaction might be because the market expects the business to turn around.

The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on Concurrent Technologies' earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What About The Total Shareholder Return (TSR)?

We've already covered Concurrent Technologies' share price action, but we should also mention its total shareholder return (TSR). Arguably the TSR is a more complete return calculation because it accounts for the value of dividends (as if they were reinvested), along with the hypothetical value of any discounted capital that have been offered to shareholders. Dividends have been really beneficial for Concurrent Technologies shareholders, and that cash payout contributed to why its TSR of 1.9%, over the last 5 years, is better than the share price return.

A Different Perspective

While it's certainly disappointing to see that Concurrent Technologies shares lost 5.4% throughout the year, that wasn't as bad as the market loss of 6.2%. Longer term investors wouldn't be so upset, since they would have made 0.4%, each year, over five years. It could be that the business is just facing some short term problems, but shareholders should keep a close eye on the fundamentals. 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. Like risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 3 warning signs for Concurrent Technologies (of which 1 is concerning!) you should know about.