Amazon’s 49,000% Gain: The Most ‘Super’ of ‘Superstocks’ Since 1926
only 0.33% of all companies that were part of the U.S. stock market at any point over those nine decades accounted for half of all the wealth generated for investors. And fewer than 1.1% of all the stocks that existed created three-quarters of the stock market’s cumulative dollar gains — as measured relative to the returns on cash.
Without such “superstocks,” as financial adviser William Bernstein has called them, the stock market wouldn’t have been worth owning at all. The 1,000 top performers since 1926 — under 4% of all stocks — account for all the stock market’s gains, Prof. Bessembinder’s research shows. You could have matched the returns of all the other 96% of stocks combined by putting your money in one-month U.S. Treasury bills.