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If you buy and hold a stock for many years, you'd hope to be making a profit. Furthermore, you'd generally like to see the share price rise faster than the market. Unfortunately for shareholders, while the Landstar System, Inc. (NASDAQ:LSTR) share price is up 53% in the last five years, that's less than the market return. Zooming in, the stock is up a respectable 9.6% in the last year.
With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.
View our latest analysis for Landstar System
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 imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.
During five years of share price growth, Landstar System actually saw its EPS drop 0.7% per year.
So it's hard to argue that the earnings per share are the best metric to judge the company, as it may not be optimized for profits at this point. Since the change in EPS doesn't seem to correlate with the change in share price, it's worth taking a look at other metrics.
We doubt the modest 1.9% dividend yield is attracting many buyers to the stock. In contrast revenue growth of 8.8% per year is probably viewed as evidence that Landstar System is growing, a real positive. It's quite possible that management are prioritizing revenue growth over EPS growth at the moment.
The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).
Landstar System is well known by investors, and plenty of clever analysts have tried to predict the future profit levels. If you are thinking of buying or selling Landstar System stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst consensus estimates for future profits.
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 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, Landstar System's TSR for the last 5 years was 68%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.