Passive investing in an index fund is a good way to ensure your own returns roughly match the overall market. Active investors aim to buy stocks that vastly outperform the market - but in the process, they risk under-performance. For example, the National Bank Holdings Corporation (NYSE:NBHC) share price is down 22% in the last year. That's disappointing when you consider the market returned 14%. On the other hand, the stock is actually up 11% over three years. More recently, the share price has dropped a further 8.8% in a month.

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.

View our latest analysis for National Bank Holdings

To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' 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.

During the unfortunate twelve months during which the National Bank Holdings share price fell, it actually saw its earnings per share (EPS) improve by 8.7%. Of course, the situation might betray previous over-optimism about growth.

The divergence between the EPS and the share price is quite notable, during the year. But we might find some different metrics explain the share price movements better.

National Bank Holdings managed to grow revenue over the last year, which is usually a real positive. Since we can't easily explain the share price movement based on these metrics, it might be worth considering how market sentiment has changed towards the stock.

The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

If you are thinking of buying or selling National Bank Holdings stock, you should check out this FREE detailed report on its balance sheet.

What About Dividends?

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. 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. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, National Bank Holdings' TSR for the last 1 year was -20%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.