Many investors define successful investing as beating the market average over the long term. But if you try your hand at stock picking, you risk returning less than the market. Unfortunately, that’s been the case for longer term Trematon Capital Investments Limited (JSE:TMT) shareholders, since the share price is down 25% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return of around 19%.

So let’s have a look and see if the longer term performance of the company has been in line with the underlying business’ progress.

View our latest analysis for Trematon Capital Investments

Because Trematon Capital Investments made a loss in the last twelve months, we think the market is probably more focussed on revenue and revenue growth, at least for now. When a company doesn’t make profits, we’d generally hope to see good revenue growth. That’s because fast revenue growth can be easily extrapolated to forecast profits, often of considerable size.

In the last three years, Trematon Capital Investments saw its revenue grow by 11% per year, compound. That’s a fairly respectable growth rate. Shareholders have seen the share price fall at 8% per year, for three years. This implies the market had higher expectations of Trematon Capital Investments. However, that’s in the past now, and it’s the future is more important – and the future looks brighter (based on revenue, anyway).

The image below shows how earnings and revenue have tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

We’re pleased to report that the CEO is remunerated more modestly than most CEOs at similarly capitalized companies. It’s always worth keeping an eye on CEO pay, but a more important question is whether the company will grow earnings throughout the years. This free interactive report on Trematon Capital Investments’ earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). 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. We note that for Trematon Capital Investments the TSR over the last 3 years was 8.4%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!