Wealth Creation and Destruction in 100 Years of U.S. Stocks

1. 1. Over the 100 years from 1926 to 2025, the median buy-and-hold return for individual U.S. common stocks was -6.87%, while the mean was over 30,000%.
2. 2. Only 41.17% of stocks outperformed one-month Treasury bills over their lifetimes, and just 27.60% outperformed the value-weighted market portfolio.
3. 3. The top five stocks by cumulative buy-and-hold return are Altria Group (4.42 million percent), Vulcan Materials, Kansas City Southern, IBM, and General Dynamics, all with annualized returns between 13% and 16.5% compounded over roughly 100 years.
4. 4. Nvidia delivered the highest annualized compound return among stocks with over 20 years of data: 37.04% per year from its 1999 IPO through 2025, turning $1 into $4,959.
5. 5. Aggregate shareholder wealth creation (SWC) across all U.S. common stocks from 1926 to 2025 totaled $90.96 trillion, but 59.13% of firms reduced shareholder wealth relative to Treasury bills.
6. 6. The top six wealth-creating firms are Apple ($5.02 trillion), Nvidia ($4.58 trillion), Microsoft ($4.03 trillion), Alphabet ($3.57 trillion), Amazon ($2.27 trillion), and Broadcom ($1.60 trillion), all with IPOs after 1980.
7. 7. Wealth creation has become dramatically more concentrated: just 46 firms now account for half of the $90.96 trillion in net SWC, down from 89 firms in the 1926–2016 period.
8. 8. Over the 2017–2025 period, the top 30 firms accounted for 61.19% of net SWC, compared to 31.06% for the top 30 through 2016, indicating a sharp increase in concentration.
9. 9. Only 3.72% of all firms (1,082 out of 29,081) accounted for 100% of net wealth creation, with the remaining 96.28% collectively matching Treasury bill returns.
10. 10. The study concludes that future stock market outcomes will continue to display positive skewness and concentration, but whether the trend toward increased concentration will persist is uncertain, particularly regarding AI's impact.