Wizz Air Holdings Plc (LON:WIZZ) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 18% in the last week. But the last three years have seen a terrible decline. To wit, the share price sky-dived 70% in that time. Arguably, the recent bounce is to be expected after such a bad drop. But the more important question is whether the underlying business can justify a higher price still.

The recent uptick of 18% could be a positive sign of things to come, so let's take a look at historical fundamentals.

View our latest analysis for Wizz Air Holdings

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 five years of share price growth, Wizz Air Holdings moved from a loss to profitability. That would generally be considered a positive, so we are surprised to see the share price is down. So given the share price is down it's worth checking some other metrics too.

We note that, in three years, revenue has actually grown at a 50% annual rate, so that doesn't seem to be a reason to sell shares. This analysis is just perfunctory, but it might be worth researching Wizz Air Holdings more closely, as sometimes stocks fall unfairly. This could present an opportunity.

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

It's probably worth noting we've seen significant insider buying in the last quarter, which we consider a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think Wizz Air Holdings will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).

A Different Perspective

Investors in Wizz Air Holdings had a tough year, with a total loss of 15%, against a market gain of about 17%. 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. However, the loss over the last year isn't as bad as the 10% per annum loss investors have suffered over the last half decade. We'd need to see some sustained improvements in the key metrics before we could muster much enthusiasm. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Wizz Air Holdings better, we need to consider many other factors. Case in point: We've spotted 3 warning signs for Wizz Air Holdings you should be aware of, and 2 of them don't sit too well with us.