Take Charles Fabrikant, chief executive of Seacor Holdings. Seacor focuses on providing equipment to the offshore oil and gas industries. As the company has navigated many vicious energy cycles since it went public in 1992, its stock has risen more than 800 percent, compared with nearly 400 percent for the wider market. It does not give out earnings guidance or hold quarterly conference calls.

“You need to think like a private owner,” Mr. Fabrikant said in an interview. “You can’t make an investment with the expectation that it will produce the returns that you hope for in quarters, or semesters, or sometimes years.”

Another company off the beaten track is Middleby, based in Elgin, Ill., whose core business is making ovens for restaurant chains. Its stock is up over 800 percent in the last 10 years, more than 10 times as much as the market over the same period. “These guys are the antithesis of ‘We’ve got to hit the number this quarter,’” said C. Schon Williams, an analyst at BB&T Capital Markets. “They don’t give guidance. It goes back to this being a long-term game.”

But do public companies that aim for the long term actually outperform other public companies?

Amazon has sat at the center of this debate for years.

The company has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. It has invested heavily over that period, often sacrificing profits in the process. Investors who are bullish on Amazon’s stock assert that the investments will one day produce industry-beating returns, while critics argue that such returns should have materialized by now, given that the company is not exactly young anymore. Amazon is still reporting a relatively meager amount of net income.

Still, the bulls seem to be gaining the edge. Analysts have a yardstick that they say does more than others to determine the fundamental performance of a company over time. It is free cash flow, or the actual cash generated by the company’s operations after subtracting what it spends on investing in its own business.