As an investor its worth striving to ensure your overall portfolio beats the market average. But its virtually certain that sometimes you will buy stocks that fall short of the market average returns. Unfortunately, that's been the case for longer term Keppel Infrastructure Trust (SGX:A7RU) shareholders, since the share price is down 17% in the last three years, falling well short of the market decline of around 16%.

Since shareholders are down over the longer term, lets look at the underlying fundamentals over the that time and see if they've been consistent with returns.

View our latest analysis for Keppel Infrastructure Trust

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 way to examine how market sentiment has changed over time is to look at the interaction between a company's share price and its earnings per share (EPS).

During the unfortunate three years of share price decline, Keppel Infrastructure Trust actually saw its earnings per share (EPS) improve by 19% per year. This is quite a puzzle, and suggests there might be something temporarily buoying the share price. Alternatively, growth expectations may have been unreasonable in the past.

It's worth taking a look at other metrics, because the EPS growth doesn't seem to match with the falling share price.

Given the healthiness of the dividend payments, we doubt that they've concerned the market. It's good to see that Keppel Infrastructure Trust has increased its revenue over the last three years. If the company can keep growing revenue, there may be an opportunity for investors. You might have to dig deeper to understand the recent share price weakness.

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

We know that Keppel Infrastructure Trust has improved its bottom line lately, but what does the future have in store? If you are thinking of buying or selling Keppel Infrastructure Trust stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts.

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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. In the case of Keppel Infrastructure Trust, it has a TSR of 11% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!