The Stock Market’s Lopsided Reality
When it comes to the U.S. stock market, it’s no secret that most individual stocks ultimately perform worse than Treasury bills. However, a new study spanning 100 years of the U.S. stock market reveals that nearly 60% of all stocks ever listed left investors worse off than if they had simply kept their money in Treasury bills.
Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, has tracked the pattern for years. His latest update, covering 1926 through 2025, shows the names at the top have shifted from oil and industrial giants to Big Tech.
The Top 10 Wealth-Creating Stocks
Just 46 companies account for half of the entire $91 trillion in wealth created, down from 89 companies in his earlier study through 2016. The top 10 alone make up 29% of that total — nearly one-third of a century’s worth of stock market wealth — despite representing just 10 of the 29,754 common stocks listed on the U.S. public markets.
The top 10 wealth-creating stocks are dominated by Big Tech, with Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta, and Tesla occupying eight of the top 10 spots. Apple alone has created 5.5% of all the wealth generated in U.S. stock market history. Nvidia, fueled by the artificial intelligence boom, accounts for another 5%, with most of that wealth created in just the past few years.
The Two Outliers: Exxon Mobil and Walmart
That leaves an odd couple: Exxon Mobil and Walmart. One is an oil company, while the other is a discount retailer. Somehow, both are wedged in among the chipmakers. They didn’t get there by luck. Exxon Mobil created roughly $1.42 trillion in lifetime shareholder wealth, while Walmart generated about $1.20 trillion. That places Exxon at No. 7 all time and Walmart at No. 10.
Exxon Mobil has been a part of the market throughout the entire century Bessembinder studied, appearing in the first month of his data in 1926 and remaining there through 2025. It built its fortune the slow way: by paying dividends year after year. That meant the company didn’t need dramatic stock price gains to make shareholders rich. It consistently returned cash to investors, allowing those payments to compound over time.
Walmart’s story is similar. The retailer has traded publicly since 1970 and has increased its dividend every year since 1974. Investors who reinvested those increased payouts benefited from decades of compounding.
What This Means for Your Money
The findings offer a cautionary lesson for investors. If most individual stocks ultimately perform worse than Treasury bills, and only a small handful create almost all of the market’s wealth, the odds of choosing the next Apple before everyone else are slim. That’s one reason why broad index funds make so much sense. You don’t have to guess the winners because you own them all.
There’s another takeaway. The companies driving the market’s gains are becoming increasingly concentrated, and they’re largely the same technology giants that dominate most index funds. When you buy an S&P 500 index fund today, an increasing share of your money is invested in a handful of massive tech companies, whether you intended to make that bet or not.
