Yahoo Finance Can You Imagine How Elated VeriSign's (NASDAQ:VRSN) Shareholders Feel About Its 313% Share Price Gain?
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We think all investors should try to buy and hold high quality multi-year winners. While not every stock performs well, when investors win, they can win big. To wit, the VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) share price has soared 313% over five years. This just goes to show the value creation that some businesses can achieve. Also pleasing for shareholders was the 20% gain in the last three months. But this move may well have been assisted by the reasonably buoyant market (up 10% in 90 days).
Check out our latest analysis for VeriSign
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 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, VeriSign achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 5.3% per year. This EPS growth is slower than the share price growth of 33% per year, over the same period. This suggests that market participants hold the company in higher regard, these days. That's not necessarily surprising considering the five-year track record of earnings growth.
The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).
This free interactive report on VeriSign's earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.
A Different Perspective
It's good to see that VeriSign has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 69% in the last twelve months. Since the one-year TSR is better than the five-year TSR (the latter coming in at 33% 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. Before spending more time on VeriSign it might be wise to click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling shares.
If you are like me, then you will not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying.
Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on US exchanges.
We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material.
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. Thank you for reading.
