The truth is that if you invest for long enough, you're going to end up with some losing stocks. But the long term shareholders of Envirosuite Limited (ASX:EVS) have had an unfortunate run in the last three years. Unfortunately, they have held through a 58% decline in the share price in that time. And more recent buyers are having a tough time too, with a drop of 45% in the last year. More recently, the share price has dropped a further 25% in a month.

After losing 16% this past week, it's worth investigating the company's fundamentals to see what we can infer from past performance.

View our latest analysis for Envirosuite

Given that Envirosuite 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. Shareholders of unprofitable companies usually expect strong revenue growth. That's because fast revenue growth can be easily extrapolated to forecast profits, often of considerable size.

In the last three years, Envirosuite saw its revenue grow by 18% per year, compound. That's a pretty good rate of top-line growth. So some shareholders would be frustrated with the compound loss of 17% per year. The market must have had really high expectations to be disappointed with this progress. So this is one stock that might be worth investigating further, or even adding to your watchlist.

The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

It's good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That's a positive. That said, we think earnings and revenue growth trends are even more important factors to consider. So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think Envirosuite will earn in the future (free profit forecasts).

A Different Perspective

Envirosuite shareholders are down 45% for the year, but the market itself is up 7.5%. 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. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 5% over the last half decade. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. To that end, you should be aware of the 2 warning signs we've spotted with Envirosuite .