On average, over time, stock markets tend to rise higher. This makes investing attractive. But not every stock you buy will perform as well as the overall market. For example, the American Campus Communities, Inc. (NYSE:ACC), share price is up over the last year, but its gain of 38% trails the market return. However, the stock hasn’t done so well in the longer term, with the stock only up 13% in three years.
View our latest analysis for American Campus Communities
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).
Over the last twelve months, American Campus Communities actually shrank its EPS by 96%.
So we don’t think that investors are paying too much attention to EPS. Therefore, it seems likely that investors are putting more weight on metrics other than EPS, at the moment.
Unfortunately American Campus Communities’ fell 10% over twelve months. So the fundamental metrics don’t provide an obvious explanation for the share price gain.
The image below shows how earnings and revenue have tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).
NYSE:ACC Earnings and Revenue Growth June 1st 2021
This free interactive report on American Campus Communities’ balance sheet strength is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.
What About Dividends?
When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. The TSR incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, American Campus Communities’ TSR for the last year was 45%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there’s no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!
A Different Perspective
American Campus Communities’ TSR for the year was broadly in line with the market average, at 45%. That gain looks pretty satisfying, and it is even better than the five-year TSR of 5% per year. Even if the share price growth slows down from here, there’s a good chance that this is business worth watching in the long term. 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. Even so, be aware that American Campus Communities is showing 4 warning signs in our investment analysis , and 1 of those is significant…
We will like American Campus Communities better if we see some big insider buys. While we wait, check out this free list of growing companies with considerable, recent, insider buying.
Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on US exchanges.
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