Why Earnings Growth is Important to a Stock’s Performance?

If you go back through the history of the stock market there is a recurring theme among those stocks which have had some of the strongest price appreciation and it’s related to their Earnings Growth. If you plot a chart of Earnings Growth versus a companies Stock Price there is a usually a strong relationship between the two.Here are a few examples over the past few years. First lets look at ELNT and its associated table of Earnings Growth and Stock Price Meanwhile if we take the table above and make a graphical plot of ELNT’s Earnings Growth versus its Stock Price show a very strong relationship. Notice how ELNT’s stock price (blue line) began to rise significantly as its Earnings Growth (red line) started to accelerate beginning in December of 1999 (point A) and continued through September of 2000 (point B). From September of 1999 until September of 2000 ELNT saw its stock price rise from $9 to over $90 a share for a return of nearly 900%.
Next look what happened as ELNT’s Earnings Growth peaked in September of 2000 and began to decelerate over the next several months. As you can see ELNT’s stock price dropped in unison with its Earnings Growth (points B to C) and eventually gave back much of its gains that had occurred in 2000. over the past two years.