Study finds most U.S. stocks destroyed wealth over the past century

A century of U.S. stock data shows how narrow the road to riches has been: in a study of 29,754 common stocks from 1926 through 2025, the average buy-and-hold return topped 30,000%, but the median stock returned minus 6.9%, and about 60% of firms left long-term holders worse off than Treasury bills.

The new analysis by Arizona State University finance professor Hendrik Bessembinder puts hard numbers on a market story that is easy to miss in a bull run. U.S. shareholders’ wealth rose by $91 trillion over the century, but just 46 companies accounted for half of that gain. In Bessembinder’s earlier 2018 study, 89 firms were responsible for half of the $43 trillion in net wealth creation over 1926 to 2016, a sign that the market’s biggest winners have become even more concentrated over time.

The concentration is even starker at the top of the distribution. Bessembinder found that 1,082 firms, or 3.7% of the total, generated all of the net wealth creation in the 2026 study. That leaves the vast majority of listed companies with little or no lasting contribution to investors’ aggregate returns, even though a few standout names produced enormous gains for those who held them early and long enough.

The finding lands squarely in a market environment where performance-chasing has been rewarded by a small cluster of stocks and punished elsewhere. Jeremy Grantham of GMO said in January 2026 that the U.S. stock market had been in bubble territory for a prolonged period and warned that the bubble would eventually burst. Northern Trust has also said global equity markets had climbed to record levels, while concerns about stretched valuations, uneven market breadth and softer economic data should be viewed in context.

That context matters for retirement savers and ETF buyers who are often pushed toward what has already worked best. Broad index funds have delivered through the dominance of a few heavyweights, but Bessembinder’s century-long record shows why that success can mask hidden fragility: the market can build extraordinary wealth over decades and still deliver brutal losses to most individual stocks along the way.