One simple way to benefit from the stock market is to buy an index fund. But if you pick the right individual stocks, you could make more than that. Just take a look at Stamford Land Corporation Ltd (SGX:H07), which is up 22%, over three years, soundly beating the market decline of 2.1% (not including dividends). On the other hand, the returns haven't been quite so good recently, with shareholders up just 8.1% , including dividends .

With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

See our latest analysis for Stamford Land

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 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 three years of share price growth, Stamford Land moved from a loss to profitability. That would generally be considered a positive, so we'd expect the share price to be up.

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

Before buying or selling a stock, we always recommend a close examination of historic growth trends, available here.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. In the case of Stamford Land, it has a TSR of 34% 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!

A Different Perspective

We're pleased to report that Stamford Land shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 8.1% over one year. That's including the dividend. There's no doubt those recent returns are much better than the TSR loss of 2% per year over five years. The long term loss makes us cautious, but the short term TSR gain certainly hints at a brighter future. 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. Even so, be aware that Stamford Land is showing 1 warning sign in our investment analysis , you should know about...