The worst result, after buying shares in a company (assuming no leverage), would be if you lose all the money you put in. But on a lighter note, a good company can see its share price rise well over 100%. For example, the SandRidge Energy, Inc. (NYSE:SD) share price has soared 103% in the last half decade. Most would be very happy with that. On the other hand, the stock price has retraced 9.9% in the last week. But this could be related to the soft market, with stocks selling off around 4.4% in the last week.

Now it's worth having a look at the company's fundamentals too, because that will help us determine if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

View our latest analysis for SandRidge Energy

To paraphrase Benjamin Graham: Over the short term the market is a voting machine, but over the long term it's a weighing machine. 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, SandRidge Energy actually saw its EPS drop 4.1% per year.

By glancing at these numbers, we'd posit that the decline in earnings per share is not representative of how the business has changed over the years. 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.

It is not great to see that revenue has dropped by 7.9% per year over five years. So it seems one might have to take closer look at earnings and revenue trends to see how they might influence the share price.

You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

It's probably worth noting that the CEO is paid less than the median at similar sized companies. It's always worth keeping an eye on CEO pay, but a more important question is whether the company will grow earnings throughout the years. You can see what analysts are predicting for SandRidge Energy in this interactive graph of future profit estimates.

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 incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. We note that for SandRidge Energy the TSR over the last 5 years was 165%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!