When you buy shares in a company, it’s worth keeping in mind the possibility that it could fail, and you could lose your money. But on the bright side, if you buy shares in a high quality company at the right price, you can gain well over 100%. For instance, the price of ABO Energy GmbH & Co. KGaA (ETR:AB9) stock is up an impressive 119% over the last five years. In the last week the share price is up 3.7%.

So let’s assess the underlying fundamentals over the last 5 years and see if they’ve moved in lock-step with shareholder returns.

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To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it’s a weighing machine. One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

During five years of share price growth, ABO Energy GmbH KGaA achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 13% per year. This EPS growth is lower than the 17% average annual increase in the share price. So it’s fair to assume the market has a higher opinion of the business than it did five years ago. 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).

This free interactive report on ABO Energy GmbH KGaA’s 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. As it happens, ABO Energy GmbH KGaA’s TSR for the last 5 years was 131%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there’s no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

While the broader market gained around 14% in the last year, ABO Energy GmbH KGaA shareholders lost 23% (even including dividends). 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. On the bright side, long term shareholders have made money, with a gain of 18% per year over half a decade. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. It’s always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand ABO Energy GmbH KGaA better, we need to consider many other factors. For example, we’ve discovered 4 warning signs for ABO Energy GmbH KGaA (1 shouldn’t be ignored!) that you should be aware of before investing here.