The Tullow Oil (LON:TLW) Share Price Has Gained 90% And Shareholders Are Hoping For More

The simplest way to invest in stocks is to buy exchange traded funds. But if you pick the right individual stocks, you could make more than that. To wit, the Tullow Oil plc (LON:TLW) share price is 90% higher than it was a year ago, much better than the market return of around 19% (not including dividends) in the same period. That's a solid performance by our standards! Zooming out, the stock is actually down 74% in the last three years.

See our latest analysis for Tullow Oil

Tullow Oil isn't currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. Shareholders of unprofitable companies usually expect strong revenue growth. As you can imagine, fast revenue growth, when maintained, often leads to fast profit growth.

In the last year Tullow Oil saw its revenue shrink by 17%. The stock is up 90% in that time, a fine performance given the revenue drop. We can correlate the share price rise with revenue or profit growth, but it seems the market had previously expected weaker results, and sentiment around the stock is improving.

You can see how earnings and revenue have changed over time in the image below (click on the chart to see the exact values).

earnings-and-revenue-growth

Tullow Oil is well known by investors, and plenty of clever analysts have tried to predict the future profit levels. Given we have quite a good number of analyst forecasts, it might be well worth checking out this free chart depicting consensus estimates.

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that Tullow Oil shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 90% over the last year. That certainly beats the loss of about 11% per year over the last half decade. This makes us a little wary, but the business might have turned around its fortunes. 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. Take risks, for example - Tullow Oil has 1 warning sign we think you should be aware of.

We will like Tullow Oil 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 GB exchanges.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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