Morgan Stanley IM: Total Shareholder Return: Linking The Drivers of Total Returns to Fundamentals

• The concepts are useful to help assess the prospective returns of a stock and to create a framework for flagging potential value traps, companies with justifiably inexpensive valuations.
• The analysis reveals that few investors in the stocks of companies that pay dividends earned the TSR and refutes the common belief that dividends contribute to capital accumulation.
• This framework gives investors a checklist of drivers and the tools to help assess them.

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