The most you can lose on any stock (assuming you don’t use leverage) is 100% of your money. But on a lighter note, a good company can see its share price rise well over 100%. Long term TASCO Berhad (KLSE:TASCO) shareholders would be well aware of this, since the stock is up 237% in five years.

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. 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.

Over half a decade, TASCO Berhad managed to grow its earnings per share at 33% a year. So the EPS growth rate is rather close to the annualized share price gain of 27% per year. Therefore one could conclude that sentiment towards the shares hasn’t morphed very much. In fact, the share price seems to largely reflect the EPS growth.

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

This free interactive report on TASCO Berhad’s earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. We note that for TASCO Berhad the TSR over the last 5 years was 284%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

While the broader market lost about 0.3% in the twelve months, TASCO Berhad shareholders did even worse, losing 19% (even including dividends). However, it could simply be that the share price has been impacted by broader market jitters. It might be worth keeping an eye on the fundamentals, in case there’s a good opportunity. Longer term investors wouldn’t be so upset, since they would have made 31%, each year, over five years. If the fundamental data continues to indicate long term sustainable growth, the current sell-off could be an opportunity worth considering. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Case in point: We’ve spotted 1 warning sign for TASCO Berhad you should be aware of.