The main point of investing for the long term is to make money. Better yet, you'd like to see the share price move up more than the market average. Unfortunately for shareholders, while the Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp. (NASDAQ:CCEC) share price is up 57% in the last five years, that's less than the market return. Some buyers are laughing, though, with an increase of 29% in the last year.

Now it's worth having a look at the company's fundamentals too, because that will help us determine if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

See our latest analysis for Capital Clean Energy Carriers

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.

During the five years of share price growth, Capital Clean Energy Carriers moved from a loss to profitability. That would generally be considered a positive, so we'd hope to see the share price to rise.

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

Dive deeper into Capital Clean Energy Carriers' key metrics by checking this interactive graph of Capital Clean Energy Carriers's earnings, revenue and cash flow.

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. We note that for Capital Clean Energy Carriers the TSR over the last 5 years was 106%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

A Different Perspective

Capital Clean Energy Carriers shareholders have received returns of 34% over twelve months (even including dividends), which isn't far from the general market return. That gain looks pretty satisfying, and it is even better than the five-year TSR of 16% per year. Even if the share price growth slows down from here, there's a good chance that this is business worth watching in the long term. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. Like risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 5 warning signs for Capital Clean Energy Carriers (of which 4 are concerning!) you should know about.