By buying an index fund, you can roughly match the market return with ease. But if you buy good businesses at attractive prices, your portfolio returns could exceed the average market return. For example, Uni-Asia Group Limited (SGX:CHJ) shareholders have seen the share price rise 46% over three years, well in excess of the market decline (1.7%, not including dividends). On the other hand, the returns haven't been quite so good recently, with shareholders up just 25% , including dividends .

So let's investigate and see if the longer term performance of the company has been in line with the underlying business' progress.

See our latest analysis for Uni-Asia Group

To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' 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 three years of share price growth, Uni-Asia Group moved from a loss to profitability. That would generally be considered a positive, so we'd expect the share price to be up.

The company's earnings per share (over time) is depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

It is of course excellent to see how Uni-Asia Group has grown profits over the years, but the future is more important for shareholders. It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on how its financial position has changed over time.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising or spin-off. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. We note that for Uni-Asia Group the TSR over the last 3 years was 86%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

A Different Perspective

We're pleased to report that Uni-Asia Group shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 25% over one year. Of course, that includes the dividend. Since the one-year TSR is better than the five-year TSR (the latter coming in at 12% per year), it would seem that the stock's performance has improved in recent times. In the best case scenario, this may hint at some real business momentum, implying that now could be a great time to delve deeper. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Uni-Asia Group better, we need to consider many other factors. For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for Uni-Asia Group that you should be aware of.