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It's easy to match the overall market return by buying an index fund. But if you buy individual stocks, you can do both better or worse than that. That downside risk was realized by Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank Corporation Limited (HKG:6122) shareholders over the last year, as the share price declined 14%. That contrasts poorly with the market return of 2.8%. We wouldn't rush to judgement on Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank because we don't have a long term history to look at. It's up 2.8% in the last seven days.
View our latest analysis for Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank
While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. 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.
Unhappily, Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank had to report a 23% decline in EPS over the last year. This fall in the EPS is significantly worse than the 14% the share price fall. So the market may not be too worried about the EPS figure, at the moment -- or it may have expected earnings to drop faster.
The graphic below depicts how EPS has changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).
We consider it positive that insiders have made significant purchases in the last year. Even so, future earnings will be far more important to whether current shareholders make money. Dive deeper into the earnings by checking this interactive graph of Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank'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). Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. As it happens, Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank's TSR for the last year was -7.8%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!
A Different Perspective
Given that the market gained 2.8% in the last year, Jilin Jiutai Rural Commercial Bank shareholders might be miffed that they lost 7.8% (even including dividends) . However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. With the stock down 5.5% over the last three months, the market doesn't seem to believe that the company has solved all its problems. Given the relatively short history of this stock, we'd remain pretty wary until we see some strong business performance. If you want to research this stock further, the data on insider buying is an obvious place to start. You can click here to see who has been buying shares - and the price they paid.