r/stocks
A Century of Stock Market Winners and Why Most Stocks Failed to Deliver
A century-long study shows the US stock market returned over 1.5 million percent, but the median individual stock lost money.
- The entire U.S. stock market generated a massive 1,504,057% compound return over the last century.
- Long-term buy-and-hold strategies for the broad market create enormous aggregate wealth.
- The median individual stock actually lost money over the long term.
- Most individual stocks fail to deliver positive returns, making stock picking highly risky.
The compound buy-and-hold return to the entire U.S. stock market over more than 100 years was 1,504,057%. Yet the median individual stock lost money.
Hendrik Bessembinder has spent years asking one of the most important and counterintuitive questions in investing: if the stock market creates enormous wealth in aggregate, why do most individual stocks fail? In his March 2026 study “One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets,” Bessembinder extended his 2018 research, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” to cover a full century of U.S. market history every common stock listed between January 1926 and December 2025.
The study encompassed 29,754 stocks issued by 29,081 firms, drawing on the Center for Research in Security Prices database. The picture that emerges is humbling.
If you never sell, you can never lose money.
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That is simply not true. You may not have lost money from a tax perspective but you certainly lost money. It is delusional to think otherwise.
Great article
Catch the winners!