As an investor its worth striving to ensure your overall portfolio beats the market average. But if you try your hand at stock picking, you risk returning less than the market. Unfortunately, that's been the case for longer term Mi Technovation Berhad (KLSE:MI) shareholders, since the share price is down 50% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return of around 20%. Shareholders have had an even rougher run lately, with the share price down 24% in the last 90 days.

Now let's have a look at the company's fundamentals, and see if the long term shareholder return has matched the performance of the underlying business.

See our latest analysis for Mi Technovation Berhad

In his essay The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville Warren Buffett described how share prices do not always rationally reflect the value of a business. 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).

Although the share price is down over three years, Mi Technovation Berhad actually managed to grow EPS by 7.5% per year in that time. Given the share price reaction, one might suspect that EPS is not a good guide to the business performance during the period (perhaps due to a one-off loss or gain). Alternatively, growth expectations may have been unreasonable in the past.

Since the change in EPS doesn't seem to correlate with the change in share price, it's worth taking a look at other metrics.

Revenue is actually up 4.2% over the three years, so the share price drop doesn't seem to hinge on revenue, either. It's probably worth investigating Mi Technovation Berhad further; while we may be missing something on this analysis, there might also be an opportunity.

You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

It's probably worth noting that the CEO is paid less than the median at similar sized companies. It's always worth keeping an eye on CEO pay, but a more important question is whether the company will grow earnings throughout the years. If you are thinking of buying or selling Mi Technovation Berhad stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts.

It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. 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. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. As it happens, Mi Technovation Berhad's TSR for the last 3 years 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!

Mi Technovation Berhad provided a TSR of 17% over the year (including dividends). That's fairly close to the broader market return. Most would be happy with a gain, and it helps that the year's return is actually better than the average return over five years, which was 9%. 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. 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. For instance, we've identified 1 warning sign for Mi Technovation Berhad that you should be aware of.

We will like Mi Technovation Berhad better if we see some big insider buys. While we wait, check out this free list of undervalued stocks (mostly small caps) 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 Malaysian exchanges.