For many, the main point of investing is to generate higher returns than the overall market. But in any portfolio, there will be mixed results between individual stocks. So we wouldn’t blame long term Heineken Holding N.V. (AMS:HEIO) shareholders for doubting their decision to hold, with the stock down 12% over a half decade.

Since shareholders are down over the longer term, lets look at the underlying fundamentals over the that time and see if they’ve been consistent with returns.

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While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just 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.

Looking back five years, both Heineken Holding’s share price and EPS declined; the latter at a rate of 14% per year. The share price decline of 3% per year isn’t as bad as the EPS decline. The relatively muted share price reaction might be because the market expects the business to turn around.

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

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

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. 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. It’s fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. In the case of Heineken Holding, it has a TSR of -3.5% for the last 5 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

We regret to report that Heineken Holding shareholders are down 9.3% for the year (even including dividends). Unfortunately, that’s worse than the broader market decline of 3.7%. 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. Unfortunately, last year’s performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 0.7% over the last half decade. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should “buy when there is blood on the streets”, but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. It’s always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Heineken Holding better, we need to consider many other factors. Case in point: We’ve spotted 3 warning signs for Heineken Holding you should be aware of.