If you buy and hold a stock for many years, you’d hope to be making a profit. Better yet, you’d like to see the share price move up more than the market average. But CNA Financial Corporation (NYSE:CNA) has fallen short of that second goal, with a share price rise of 78% over five years, which is below the market return. However, if you include the dividends then the return is market beating. Zooming in, the stock is up a respectable 12% in the last year.

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

There is no denying that markets are sometimes efficient, but prices do not always reflect underlying business performance. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

During five years of share price growth, CNA Financial actually saw its EPS drop 0.8% per year.

By glancing at these numbers, we’d posit that the decline in earnings per share is not representative of how the business has changed over the years. Since the change in EPS doesn’t seem to correlate with the change in share price, it’s worth taking a look at other metrics.

In fact, the dividend has increased over time, which is a positive. It could be that the company is reaching maturity and dividend investors are buying for the yield. We’d posit that the revenue growth over the last five years, of 6.1% per year, would encourage people to invest.

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

It’s good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That’s a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. So we recommend checking out this free report showing consensus forecasts

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, CNA Financial’s TSR for the last 5 years was 156%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.