If you want to compound wealth in the stock market, you can do so by buying an index fund. But you can do a lot better than that by buying good quality businesses for attractive prices. For example, the Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust Limited (LON:SREI) share price is up 38% in the last five years, slightly above the market return. Also positive is the 5.7% share price rise over the last year.

With that in mind, it’s worth seeing if the company’s underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

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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.

During the five years of share price growth, Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust moved from a loss to profitability. That’s generally thought to be a genuine positive, so investors may expect to see an increasing share price.

The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

Dive deeper into Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust’s key metrics by checking this interactive graph of Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust’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. In the case of Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust, it has a TSR of 93% for the last 5 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust provided a TSR of 13% over the last twelve months. But that was short of the market average. It’s probably a good sign that the company has an even better long term track record, having provided shareholders with an annual TSR of 14% over five years. It may well be that this is a business worth popping on the watching, given the continuing positive reception, over time, from the market. It’s always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust better, we need to consider many other factors. To that end, you should learn about the 3 warning signs we’ve spotted with Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust (including 1 which is a bit concerning) .