The main aim of stock picking is to find the market-beating stocks. But every investor is virtually certain to have both over-performing and under-performing stocks. At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in Bund Center Investment Ltd (SGX:BTE), since the last five years saw the share price fall 29%.

Since shareholders are down over the longer term, lets look at the underlying fundamentals over the that time and see if they've been consistent with returns.

Check out our latest analysis for Bund Center Investment

There is no denying that markets are sometimes efficient, but prices do not always reflect underlying business performance. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

During the five years over which the share price declined, Bund Center Investment's earnings per share (EPS) dropped by 17% each year. This fall in the EPS is worse than the 7% compound annual share price fall. So investors might expect EPS to bounce back -- or they may have previously foreseen the EPS decline.

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

Dive deeper into Bund Center Investment's key metrics by checking this interactive graph of Bund Center Investment's earnings, revenue and cash flow.

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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. As it happens, Bund Center Investment's TSR for the last 5 years was -11%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

A Different Perspective

Bund Center Investment shareholders are down 13% for the year (even including dividends), but the market itself is up 3.6%. Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 2% over the last half decade. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Bund Center Investment better, we need to consider many other factors. Even so, be aware that Bund Center Investment is showing 2 warning signs in our investment analysis , and 1 of those shouldn't be ignored...