If you buy and hold a stock for many years, you'd hope to be making a profit. Better yet, you'd like to see the share price move up more than the market average. Unfortunately for shareholders, while the (TSE:7741) share price is up 59% in the last five years, that's less than the market return. The last year has been disappointing, with the stock price down 11% in that time.

Let's take a look at the underlying fundamentals over the longer term, and see if they've been consistent with shareholders returns.

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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 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 five years of share price growth, HOYA achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 14% per year. The EPS growth is more impressive than the yearly share price gain of 10% over the same period. Therefore, it seems the market has become relatively pessimistic about the company.

The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

We know that HOYA has improved its bottom line lately, but is it going to grow revenue? You could check out this report showing analyst revenue forecasts.

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. 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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. In the case of HOYA, it has a TSR of 65% for the last 5 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!

While the broader market gained around 3.7% in the last year, HOYA shareholders lost 10% (even including dividends). 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. On the bright side, long term shareholders have made money, with a gain of 11% per year over half a decade. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. Before deciding if you like the current share price, check how HOYA scores on these 3 valuation metrics.

Of course . So you may wish to see this collection of growth stocks.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on Japanese exchanges.