When you buy and hold a stock for the long term, you definitely want it to provide a positive return. Better yet, you’d like to see the share price move up more than the market average. But CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME) has fallen short of that second goal, with a share price rise of 59% over five years, which is below the market return. However, if you include the dividends then the return is market beating. Looking at the last year alone, the stock is up 20%.

Let’s take a look at the underlying fundamentals over the longer term, and see if they’ve been consistent with shareholders returns.

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While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. 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 five years of share price growth, CME Group achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 9.2% per year. So the EPS growth rate is rather close to the annualized share price gain of 10% per year. That suggests that the market sentiment around the company hasn’t changed much over that time. In fact, the share price seems to largely reflect the EPS growth.

You can see how EPS has changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

We like that insiders have been buying shares in the last twelve months. Even so, future earnings will be far more important to whether current shareholders make money. It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on CME 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 incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. As it happens, CME Group’s TSR for the last 5 years was 95%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there’s no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

It’s good to see that CME Group has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 25% in the last twelve months. Of course, that includes the dividend. That gain is better than the annual TSR over five years, which is 14%. Therefore it seems like sentiment around the company has been positive lately. In the best case scenario, this may hint at some real business momentum, implying that now could be a great time to delve deeper. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. For instance, we’ve identified 2 warning signs for CME Group that you should be aware of.