The most you can lose on any stock (assuming you don't use leverage) is 100% of your money. But on the bright side, if you buy shares in a high quality company at the right price, you can gain well over 100%. One great example is ARYZTA AG (VTX:ARYN) which saw its share price drive 122% higher over five years. It's also good to see the share price up 26% over the last quarter. But this could be related to the strong market, which is up 10% in the last three months.

So let's assess the underlying fundamentals over the last 5 years and see if they've moved in lock-step with shareholder returns.

See our latest analysis for ARYZTA

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 the last half decade, ARYZTA became profitable. That kind of transition can be an inflection point that justifies a strong share price gain, just as we have seen here.

The company's earnings per share (over time) is depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

It is of course excellent to see how ARYZTA has grown profits over the years, but the future is more important for shareholders. This free interactive report on ARYZTA's balance sheet strength is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

We're pleased to report that ARYZTA shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 18% over one year. That gain is better than the annual TSR over five years, which is 17%. Therefore it seems like sentiment around the company has been positive lately. In the best case scenario, this may hint at some real business momentum, implying that now could be a great time to delve deeper. 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. To that end, you should be aware of the 1 warning sign we've spotted with ARYZTA .

Of course ARYZTA may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of growth stocks.

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