Bull Theory@BullTheoryio
96 out of every 100 US companies never made their investors any money.
A new study from Arizona State tracked every stock listed on US markets from 1926 to 2025. That is 29,754 stocks over 100 years.
The market created $90.96 trillion in that time. All of it came from just 1,082 companies. The other 27,999 gave investors nothing. Most stocks lose money. Only 48% of stocks made any money at all. Only 41% beat a savings account. 59% of companies lost money for shareholders.
The median stock lost 6.87%.
But the average stock returned 30,621%. That gap is the whole story. A few enormous winners pull the average up while most stocks bleed.
So who were the winners?
• Apple: $5.02 trillion
• Nvidia: $4.58 trillion
• Microsoft: $4.03 trillion
• Alphabet: $3.57 trillion
• Amazon: $2.27 trillion
These are not market caps. This is total wealth created for shareholders since the company listed, measured against what that money would have earned sitting in Treasury bills.
Apple and Nvidia alone made 10.6% of all the wealth the US market has created since 1926.
The same researcher ran this study in 2018 with data through 2016. Back then it took 89 companies to make up half of all the wealth ever created. Nine years later, it takes only 46.
In the 90 years up to 2016, the top 30 companies made 31% of all the wealth. In the nine years since, the top 30 made 61%. Nvidia by itself made 9.32% of everything created since 2017.
Concentration doubled in nine years. And those nine years are exactly the years the AI trade took over the market.
The typical company got worse at the same time. In the first six decades of the study, the median stock returned 63.6% per decade. In the last four decades, it dropped to 5.8%. The market kept going up. Most companies stopped going up with it.
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.
