One simple way to benefit from the stock market is to buy an index fund. But if you buy good businesses at attractive prices, your portfolio returns could exceed the average market return. For example, the Ocular Therapeutix, Inc. (NASDAQ:OCUL) share price is up 89% in the last three years, clearly besting the market return of around 19% (not including dividends).

After a strong gain in the past week, it's worth seeing if longer term returns have been driven by improving fundamentals.

We've found 21 US stocks that are forecast to pay a dividend yield of over 6% next year. See the full list for free.

Given that Ocular Therapeutix didn't make a profit in the last twelve months, we'll focus on revenue growth to form a quick view of its business development. When a company doesn't make profits, we'd generally hope to see good revenue growth. Some companies are willing to postpone profitability to grow revenue faster, but in that case one would hope for good top-line growth to make up for the lack of earnings.

Over the last three years Ocular Therapeutix has grown its revenue at 11% annually. That's a very respectable growth rate. The share price gain of 24% per year shows that the market is paying attention to this growth. If that's the case, then it could be well worth while to research the growth trajectory. Keep in mind that the strength of the balance sheet impacts the options open to the company.

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

Ocular Therapeutix is a well known stock, with plenty of analyst coverage, suggesting some visibility into future growth. 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

While the broader market gained around 7.4% in the last year, Ocular Therapeutix shareholders lost 2.9%. Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. On the bright side, long term shareholders have made money, with a gain of 8% per year over half a decade. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. 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. Case in point: We've spotted 3 warning signs for Ocular Therapeutix you should be aware of.

But note: Ocular Therapeutix may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with past earnings growth (and further growth forecast).

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

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