Passive investing in an index fund is a good way to ensure your own returns roughly match the overall market. But if you buy individual stocks, you can do both better or worse than that. Investors in Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC) have tasted that bitter downside in the last year, as the share price dropped 44%. That contrasts poorly with the market return of 20%. At least the damage isn’t so bad if you look at the last three years, since the stock is down 29% in that time.

It’s worthwhile assessing if the company’s economics have been moving in lockstep with these underwhelming shareholder returns, or if there is some disparity between the two. So let’s do just that.

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Wabash National wasn’t profitable in the last twelve months, it is unlikely we’ll see a strong correlation between its share price and its earnings per share (EPS). Arguably revenue is our next best option. 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 just one year Wabash National saw its revenue fall by 25%. That’s not what investors generally want to see. The stock price has languished lately, falling 44% in a year. That seems pretty reasonable given the lack of both profits and revenue growth. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that buyers must envision either growth down the track, cost cutting, or both.

You can see how earnings and revenue have changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

Take a more thorough look at Wabash National’s financial health with this free report on its balance sheet.

Wabash National shareholders are down 43% for the year (even including dividends), but the market itself is up 20%. 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. Longer term investors wouldn’t be so upset, since they would have made 0.2%, each year, over five years. 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 Wabash National better, we need to consider many other factors. To that end, you should be aware of the 2 warning signs we’ve spotted with Wabash National .