If You Had Bought Dilip Buildcon (NSE:DBL) Stock A Year Ago, You'd Be Sitting On A 41% Loss, Today

It's easy to match the overall market return by buying an index fund. But if you buy individual stocks, you can do both better or worse than that. Unfortunately the Dilip Buildcon Limited (NSE:DBL) share price slid 41% over twelve months. That's disappointing when you consider the market returned 0.7%. However, the longer term returns haven't been so bad, with the stock down 3.8% in the last three years. More recently, the share price has dropped a further 22% in a month. This could be related to the recent financial results - you can catch up on the most recent data by reading our company report.

Check out our latest analysis for Dilip Buildcon

While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

Unfortunately Dilip Buildcon reported an EPS drop of 46% for the last year. This proportional reduction in earnings per share isn't far from the 41% decrease in the share price. So it seems that the market sentiment has not changed much, despite the weak results. Rather, the share price is remains a similar multiple of the EPS, suggesting the outlook remains the same.

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

This free interactive report on Dilip Buildcon's earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

A Different Perspective

Dilip Buildcon shareholders are down 41% for the year (even including dividends) , but the broader market is up 0.7%. Of course the long term matters more than the short term, and even great stocks will sometimes have a poor year. The three-year loss of 1.1% per year isn't as bad as the last twelve months, suggesting that the company has not been able to convince the market it has solved its problems. Although Baron Rothschild famously said to "buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own", he also focusses on high quality stocks with solid prospects. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Dilip Buildcon better, we need to consider many other factors. To that end, you should learn about the 3 warning signs we've spotted with Dilip Buildcon (including 1 which is is a bit unpleasant) .

For those who like to find winning investments this free list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on IN exchanges.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.

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