Investors in Anglo Asian Mining (LON:AAZ) have made a fantastic return of 501% over the past five years

We think all investors should try to buy and hold high quality multi-year winners. And we've seen some truly amazing gains over the years. Just think about the savvy investors who held Anglo Asian Mining PLC (LON:AAZ) shares for the last five years, while they gained 399%. This just goes to show the value creation that some businesses can achieve. In the last week the share price is up 2.9%.

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 Anglo Asian Mining

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 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, Anglo Asian Mining achieved compound earnings per share (EPS) growth of 13% per year. This EPS growth is lower than the 38% average annual increase in the share price. So it's fair to assume the market has a higher opinion of the business than it did five years ago. 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).