An Empirical Study on the Impact of Earnings per Share on Stock Prices of a Listed Bank in Malaysia

The impact of an announcement of Earnings per Share (EPS) on stock prices had often been the centre of interest to researchers, shareholders and investors. This is because; EPS is one of the investment tools to evaluate a company’s performance either in the short or long term. The estimated earnings can be used to measure the financial health and prospect of a company. Therefore, in this research paper, an investigation and evaluation has been performed to indicate the impact of EPS on the stock prices of Public Bank Berhad, a listed bank in Malaysia. The aim of the study was to investigate whether there is any correlation between Public Bank Berhad’s EPS and it a stock price for a relatively long time period of 19 years. In addition, a statistical study was conducted, using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software to evaluate if there is a significant level of impact on the bank’s EPS on its stock prices during the quarterly earnings announced since, year 2000. Although, there are some limitations in the use of EPS as an investment analysis tool, it can be concluded that EPS is a classical model, which is important and relied upon by investment analysts to measure the performance of business entities. In this research finding, it can be concluded that there is a very strong positive correlation between Public Bank Berhad’s EPS on it stock prices and that there is a significant impact of earnings announcement on Public Bank Berhad’s stock prices.