Many investors define successful investing as beating the market average over the long term. But the risk of stock picking is that you will likely buy under-performing companies. Unfortunately, that’s been the case for longer term Land Securities Group Plc (LON:LAND) shareholders, since the share price is down 27% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return of around 18%.

It’s worthwhile assessing if the company’s economics have been moving in lockstep with these underwhelming shareholder returns, or if there is some disparity between the two. So let’s do just that.

See our latest analysis for Land Securities Group

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 way to examine how market sentiment has changed over time is to look at the interaction between a company’s share price and its earnings per share (EPS).

Land Securities Group became profitable within the last five years. We would usually expect to see the share price rise as a result. So given the share price is down it’s worth checking some other metrics too.

Given the healthiness of the dividend payments, we doubt that they’ve concerned the market. We like that Land Securities Group has actually grown its revenue over the last three years. But it’s not clear to us why the share price is down. It might be worth diving deeper into the fundamentals, lest an opportunity goes begging.

The image below shows how earnings and revenue have tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

Land Securities Group is well known by investors, and plenty of clever analysts have tried to predict the future profit levels. You can see what analysts are predicting for Land Securities Group in this interactive graph of future profit estimates.

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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. As it happens, Land Securities Group’s TSR for the last 3 years was -12%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.