Ashmore Group Plc (LON:ASHM) shareholders will doubtless be very grateful to see the share price up 33% in the last quarter. But if you look at the last five years the returns have not been good. In fact, the share price is down 58%, which falls well short of the return you could get by buying an index fund.

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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While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

During the five years over which the share price declined, Ashmore Group’s earnings per share (EPS) dropped by 19% each year. The share price decline of 16% per year isn’t as bad as the EPS decline. The relatively muted share price reaction might be because the market expects the business to turn around.

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

Dive deeper into Ashmore Group’s key metrics by checking this interactive graph of Ashmore Group’s earnings, revenue and cash flow.

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. It’s fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. In the case of Ashmore Group, it has a TSR of -39% 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.

Ashmore Group provided a TSR of 11% over the year (including dividends). That’s fairly close to the broader market return. The silver lining is that the share price is up in the short term, which flies in the face of the annualised loss of 7% over the last five years. We’re pretty skeptical of turnaround stories, but it’s good to see the recent share price recovery. It’s always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Ashmore Group better, we need to consider many other factors. Case in point: We’ve spotted 3 warning signs for Ashmore Group you should be aware of, and 2 of them make us uncomfortable.