96% of US Stocks Failed to Create Wealth Over a Century, Study Finds

Almost all US stocks failed to build lasting wealth over the past century, a new Arizona State University study found, after tracking 29,754 companies from 1926 through 2025.

Just 1,082 of those firms, about 3.7%, created all of the market’s net gains. Every other stock, on average, did no better than owning Treasury bills. Those bills are short-term government loans, among the safest places to park cash.

Most US Stocks Trailed Treasury Bills

The paper, “One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets,” uses the University of Chicago’s CRSP database. It covers every stock listed on the New York and American exchanges and Nasdaq since 1926.

Its author, finance professor Hendrik Bessembinder, updated his landmark 2018 study on the same question. That earlier work first showed how few stocks drive the entire market.

The century of data shows nearly 60% of stocks left investors worse off than those safe Treasury bills. Only about 41% managed to beat them.

The averages are misleading. The middle, or median, stock lost 6.9% over its life. The overall average topped 30,000%, lifted by a handful of giant winners.

The same imbalance appears today, with gains driven by fewer and fewer companies, a pattern analysts call narrow market breadth.

A Few Giants Created the Gains

Five companies created more than one-fifth of all stock market wealth since 1926. Apple leads at $5.02 trillion, about 5.5% of the total. Nvidia follows at $4.58 trillion.

Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon round out the top five. All belong to the Magnificent Seven, the small group of Big Tech stocks that now dominates the market. Those seven created 24.2% of the century’s wealth, fueling Big Tech bubble warnings in 2026.

Timing shows how fast this happened. Nvidia only went public in 1999, yet it and Apple now hold about 10% of all wealth ever created. The trend helps explain why semiconductor stocks outperformed Big Tech and crypto this year.

“People keep saying the S&P is being carried by a handful of AI stocks, as if this is something new. It is not. The market has always run on a tiny number of winners. What changed is how few of them there are now,” analyst Bull Theory remarked.

Even the market’s smallest Nvidia supplier stocks have joined the rally.

Market Concentration Is Accelerating

The concentration is tightening fast. Using data through 2016, the 2018 study found 89 firms made up half of all net wealth.

Nine years later, just 46 firms make up half. Over the same span, total wealth ballooned to $91 trillion from $43 trillion. The winners’ circle shrank as the prize doubled.

Those nine years line up almost exactly with the rise of Big Tech and the AI boom. That overlap raises the stakes of any looming stock selloff in the market’s few leaders.

Bessembinder’s message has held for three decades. A few stocks carry the whole market, which he says favors broad index funds over picking individual winners.

The working paper has not yet been peer reviewed.