When you buy and hold a stock for the long term, you definitely want it to provide a positive return. Better yet, you'd like to see the share price move up more than the market average. But SpringWorks Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:SWTX) has fallen short of that second goal, with a share price rise of 49% over five years, which is below the market return. Some buyers are laughing, though, with an increase of 45% in the last year.

Since the long term performance has been good but there's been a recent pullback of 8.0%, let's check if the fundamentals match the share price.

View our latest analysis for SpringWorks Therapeutics

SpringWorks Therapeutics isn't currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. Shareholders of unprofitable companies usually desire strong revenue growth. That's because it's hard to be confident a company will be sustainable if revenue growth is negligible, and it never makes a profit.

For the last half decade, SpringWorks Therapeutics can boast revenue growth at a rate of 34% per year. Even measured against other revenue-focussed companies, that's a good result. It's nice to see shareholders have made a profit, but the gain of 8% over the period isn't that impressive compared to the overall market. That's surprising given the strong revenue growth. Arguably this falls in a potential sweet spot - modest share price gains but good top line growth over the long term justifies investigation, in our book.

The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

If you are thinking of buying or selling SpringWorks Therapeutics stock, you should check out this FREE detailed report on its balance sheet.

A Different Perspective

It's good to see that SpringWorks Therapeutics has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 45% in the last twelve months. That gain is better than the annual TSR over five years, which is 8%. Therefore it seems like sentiment around the company has been positive lately. In the best case scenario, this may hint at some real business momentum, implying that now could be a great time to delve deeper. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Case in point: We've spotted 1 warning sign for SpringWorks Therapeutics you should be aware of.