From 1926 through 2025, just 27.6% of stocks beat the broader market. Nearly 60% actually destroyed shareholder wealth, and the median stock delivered a lifetime return of -6.9%. Yet despite those sobering odds, U.S. stocks collectively created roughly $91 trillion in wealth over the last century, with just 46 companies responsible for half of it.

Those are some of the headline findings from a new study by Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business, who examined the performance of nearly 30,000 U.S. stocks over the last century. The research paints a striking picture of how wealth is actually created in the stock market: while broad market indexes have generated exceptional long-term returns, the vast majority of individual stocks have failed to keep pace.

Bessembinder analyzed 29,754 publicly traded U.S. stocks between 1926 and 2025. Over that period, the overall stock market produced an annualized return of about 10.1%, turning every dollar invested into more than $15,000, according to the study, detailed in this white paper. 

But those impressive aggregate returns mask an uncomfortable reality. The typical stock fared far worse. In fact, the median stock lost 6.9% over its lifetime, fewer than half of all stocks generated a positive lifetime return, only about 41% outperformed Treasury bills during the time they were publicly traded, and just 27.6% managed to outperform the market itself.

The reason is simple: stock market returns are incredibly uneven. While any stock can fall to zero, there is effectively no limit to how much a winner can rise. Over long periods, a tiny number of extraordinary companies generate gains so large that they more than offset the thousands of stocks that stagnate, disappoint, or disappear altogether. Those rare winners account for an outsized share of the market's overall success.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that this concentration has become even more extreme. In Bessembinder's original research covering 1926 through 2016, 89 companies accounted for half of all shareholder wealth created by the U.S. stock market. After adding the last nine years of data, total wealth creation more than doubled to roughly $91 trillion, yet the number of companies responsible for half of it fell to just 46.

At the top of the list are many of today's biggest technology names. Apple ranks first, generating more than $5 trillion in shareholder wealth, followed by Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon. Collectively, those five companies account for more than one-fifth of all net wealth created by the U.S. stock market over the past century, while Apple and Nvidia alone make up more than one-tenth of the total.

The concentration becomes even more remarkable further down the data. Out of more than 29,000 companies included in the study, just 1,082, less than 4% of the total, were responsible for all of the market's net wealth creation. Meanwhile, nearly six out of every ten companies actually reduced shareholder wealth relative to simply investing in one month Treasury bills.

The study also pushes back against the idea that market legends are built on impossible annual returns. Many of history's greatest investments didn't earn 50% or 100% per year. Instead, they compounded at annual rates in the low to mid teens over extraordinarily long periods. The lesson is that consistent returns sustained over decades are often far more powerful than eye popping gains that prove impossible to maintain.

For investors, the findings reinforce one of the strongest arguments for diversification. While the stock market as a whole has created enormous wealth over the past century, identifying the relatively small group of companies that ultimately drive those returns has always been exceptionally difficult. Missing just a handful of those long-term winners can dramatically reduce investment results, which helps explain why broad index funds have consistently outperformed most active stock pickers over long horizons.

Bessembinder concludes that the tendency for a small number of companies to drive most of the market's returns is unlikely to disappear because it is a natural consequence of how returns compound over time. The bigger question, he suggests, is whether technologies like artificial intelligence will make wealth creation even more concentrated in a handful of dominant firms, or broaden the playing field enough to create the next generation of market leaders.

You can read the full white paper here.