For many, the main point of investing in the stock market is to achieve spectacular returns. And highest quality companies can see their share prices grow by huge amounts. Just think about the savvy investors who held Afentra plc (LON:AET) shares for the last five years, while they gained 431%. And this is just one example of the epic gains achieved by some long term investors. Also pleasing for shareholders was the 27% gain in the last three months.

So let's assess the underlying fundamentals over the last 5 years and see if they've moved in lock-step with shareholder returns.

View our latest analysis for Afentra

Given that Afentra didn't make a profit in the last twelve months, we'll focus on revenue growth to form a quick view of its business development. When a company doesn't make profits, we'd generally hope to see good revenue growth. As you can imagine, fast revenue growth, when maintained, often leads to fast profit growth.

In the last 5 years Afentra saw its revenue grow at 101% per year. That's well above most pre-profit companies. Fortunately, the market has not missed this, and has pushed the share price up by 40% per year in that time. Despite the strong run, top performers like Afentra have been known to go on winning for decades. On the face of it, this looks lke a good opportunity, although we note sentiment seems very positive already.

You can see how earnings and revenue have changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

It's probably worth noting we've seen significant insider buying in the last quarter, which we consider a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. If you are thinking of buying or selling Afentra stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts.

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that Afentra shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 126% over the last year. That gain is better than the annual TSR over five years, which is 40%. Therefore it seems like sentiment around the company has been positive lately. Someone with an optimistic perspective could view the recent improvement in TSR as indicating that the business itself is getting better with time. 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. For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for Afentra (1 can't be ignored) that you should be aware of.