When we invest, we’re generally looking for stocks that outperform the market average. And in our experience, buying the right stocks can give your wealth a significant boost. For example, the Inchcape plc (LON:INCH) share price is up 40% in the last 5 years, clearly besting the market return of around 26% (ignoring dividends).

Now it’s worth having a look at the company’s fundamentals too, because that will help us determine if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

We’ve discovered 2 warning signs about Inchcape. View them for free.

There is no denying that markets are sometimes efficient, but prices do not always reflect 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.

Inchcape’s earnings per share are down 2.4% per year, despite strong share price performance over five years.

So it’s hard to argue that the earnings per share are the best metric to judge the company, as it may not be optimized for profits at this point. 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.

We note that the dividend is higher than it was previously – always nice to see. Maybe dividend investors have helped support the share price. We’d posit that the revenue growth over the last five years, of 6.6% per year, would encourage people to invest.

You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

It’s probably worth noting we’ve seen significant insider buying in the last quarter, which we consider a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think Inchcape will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. 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. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Inchcape’s TSR for the last 5 years was 60%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.