Did you know there are some financial metrics that can provide clues of a potential multi-bagger? Ideally, a business will show two trends; firstly a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an increasing amount of capital employed. Basically this means that a company has profitable initiatives that it can continue to reinvest in, which is a trait of a compounding machine. So, when we ran our eye over MYR Group's (NASDAQ:MYRG) trend of ROCE, we liked what we saw.

Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What is it?

Just to clarify if you're unsure, ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. To calculate this metric for MYR Group, this is the formula:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.13 = US$71m ÷ (US$950m - US$404m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).

Therefore, MYR Group has an ROCE of 13%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 10% generated by the Construction industry.

See our latest analysis for MYR Group

In the above chart we have measured MYR Group's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like, you can check out the forecasts from the analysts covering MYR Group here for free.

What Can We Tell From MYR Group's ROCE Trend?

While the current returns on capital are decent, they haven't changed much. Over the past five years, ROCE has remained relatively flat at around 13% and the business has deployed 49% more capital into its operations. Since 13% is a moderate ROCE though, it's good to see a business can continue to reinvest at these decent rates of return. Stable returns in this ballpark can be unexciting, but if they can be maintained over the long run, they often provide nice rewards to shareholders.

On a side note, MYR Group's current liabilities are still rather high at 42% of total assets. This effectively means that suppliers (or short-term creditors) are funding a large portion of the business, so just be aware that this can introduce some elements of risk. Ideally we'd like to see this reduce as that would mean fewer obligations bearing risks.

In Conclusion...

In the end, MYR Group has proven its ability to adequately reinvest capital at good rates of return. Therefore it's no surprise that shareholders have earned a respectable 92% return if they held over the last five years. So while the positive underlying trends may be accounted for by investors, we still think this stock is worth looking into further.

If you want to continue researching MYR Group, you might be interested to know about the 2 warning signs that our analysis has discovered.

If you want to search for solid companies with great earnings, check out this free list of companies with good balance sheets and impressive returns on equity.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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