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 the bright side, if you buy shares in a high quality company at the right price, you can gain well over 100%. For instance, the price of Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE:SF) stock is up an impressive 172% over the last five years. Also pleasing for shareholders was the 15% gain in the last three months.

Let's take a look at the underlying fundamentals over the longer term, and see if they've been consistent with shareholders returns.

View our latest analysis for Stifel Financial

While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. 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, Stifel Financial achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 6.0% per year. This EPS growth is lower than the 22% average annual increase in the share price. So it's fair to assume the market has a higher opinion of the business than it did five years ago. And that's hardly shocking given the track record of growth.

You can see how EPS has changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on Stifel Financial's earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Stifel Financial's TSR for the last 5 years was 195%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that Stifel Financial shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 64% over the last year. And that does include the dividend. Since the one-year TSR is better than the five-year TSR (the latter coming in at 24% per year), it would seem that the stock's performance has improved in recent times. 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. Even so, be aware that Stifel Financial is showing 1 warning sign in our investment analysis , you should know about...