FDM Group (Holdings) plc (LON:FDM) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 17% in the last month. Meanwhile over the last three years the stock has dropped hard. Indeed, the share price is down a tragic 59% in the last three years. So it's good to see it climbing back up. The rise has some hopeful, but turnarounds are often precarious.

Now let's have a look at the company's fundamentals, and see if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

See our latest analysis for FDM Group (Holdings)

To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. 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.

Although the share price is down over three years, FDM Group (Holdings) actually managed to grow EPS by 1.5% per year in that time. Given the share price reaction, one might suspect that EPS is not a good guide to the business performance during the period (perhaps due to a one-off loss or gain). Or else the company was over-hyped in the past, and so its growth has disappointed.

It looks to us like the market was probably too optimistic around growth three years ago. However, taking a look at other business metrics might shed a bit more light on the share price action.

We note that the dividend has declined - a likely contributor to the share price drop. It doesn't seem like the changes in revenue would have impacted the share price much, but a closer inspection of the data might reveal something.

The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

We know that FDM Group (Holdings) has improved its bottom line lately, but what does the future have in store? You can see what analysts are predicting for FDM Group (Holdings) in this interactive graph of future profit estimates.

What About Dividends?

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. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. In the case of FDM Group (Holdings), it has a TSR of -53% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!