In order to justify the effort of selecting individual stocks, it’s worth striving to beat the returns from a market index fund. But in any portfolio, there will be mixed results between individual stocks. At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in CSE Global Limited (SGX:544), since the last five years saw the share price fall 17%.

Now let’s have a look at the company’s fundamentals, and see if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

Check out our latest analysis for CSE Global

To quote Buffett, ‘Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace…’ 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.

Looking back five years, both CSE Global’s share price and EPS declined; the latter at a rate of 3.2% per year. Notably, the share price has fallen at 4% per year, fairly close to the change in the EPS. This suggests that market participants have not changed their view of the company all that much. So it’s fair to say the share price has been responding to changes in EPS.

The graphic below depicts how EPS has changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

We know that CSE Global has improved its bottom line lately, but is it going to grow revenue? Check if analysts think CSE Global will grow revenue in the future.

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. 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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. We note that for CSE Global the TSR over the last 5 years was 12%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

CSE Global shareholders gained a total return of 14% during the year. Unfortunately this falls short of the market return. On the bright side, that’s still a gain, and it’s actually better than the average return of 2% over half a decade It is possible that returns will improve along with the business fundamentals. 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. Case in point: We’ve spotted 2 warning signs for CSE Global you should be aware of.