When you buy and hold a stock for the long term, you definitely want it to provide a positive return. Furthermore, you'd generally like to see the share price rise faster than the market. Unfortunately for shareholders, while the Edgewell Personal Care Company (NYSE:EPC) share price is up 12% in the last five years, that's less than the market return. The last year has been disappointing, with the stock price down 6.0% in that time.

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.

View our latest analysis for Edgewell Personal Care

In his essay The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville Warren Buffett described how share prices do not always rationally reflect the value of a business. 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).

During the five years of share price growth, Edgewell Personal Care moved from a loss to profitability. That's generally thought to be a genuine positive, so investors may expect to see an increasing share price. Given that the company made a profit three years ago, but not five years ago, it is worth looking at the share price returns over the last three years, too. Indeed, the Edgewell Personal Care share price has gained 1.0% in three years. Meanwhile, EPS is up 12% per year. This EPS growth is higher than the 0.3% average annual increase in the share price over the same three years. So you might conclude the market is a little more cautious about the stock, these days.

You can see how EPS has changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

This free interactive report on Edgewell Personal Care's earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

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. As it happens, Edgewell Personal Care's TSR for the last 5 years was 19%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!