Over the past hundred years, the vast majority of U.S. stocks have failed to provide investors with long-term capital growth. I reached this conclusion after analyzing the CRSP database from the University of Chicago, which covers 29,754 companies traded on the NYSE, AMEX, and Nasdaq from 1926 to 2025.
The core finding: only 1,082 firms (approximately 3.7% of the total) generated all the net wealth of the stock market. The remaining stocks, on average, showed returns no higher than short-term U.S. Treasury bills — an instrument traditionally considered one of the safest for preserving capital.
The Myth of Average Growth
Averages here are misleading. Looking at the median, half of all stocks depreciated by 6.9% over their history. The overall average exceeded 30,000%, but this was driven upward by just a few major winners. Nearly 60% of stocks delivered less to investors than even "safe" Treasury bills. Only about 41% of stocks managed to outperform them.
This imbalance has become even more pronounced in recent years. The bulk of profits are generated by a handful of corporations. Financial analysts refer to this situation as extremely narrow market breadth.
The Top Five and the "Magnificent Seven"
Five companies have provided more than one-fifth of all the wealth created by the stock market since 1926. Topping the list is Apple with $5.02 trillion — about 5.5% of the total. In second place is Nvidia at $4.58 trillion. The top five also include Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. All are part of the so-called "Magnificent Seven" — a small group of IT giants that now dictate market rules. These seven companies account for 24.2% of all wealth over the hundred-year period.
The speed of change is striking: Nvidia held its initial public offering only in 1999, yet today, together with Apple, it controls a tenth of the market's accumulated capitalization. This explains why semiconductor brand securities have outperformed both the Big Tech segment and cryptocurrencies in terms of returns.
Concentration Is Increasing
The share of individual companies in total market capitalization is growing rapidly. Data up to 2016 showed that half of the market's net wealth came from 89 companies. Just nine years later, a similar volume of capital is concentrated in the hands of only 46 companies. Over this period, total capitalization grew from $43 trillion to $91 trillion, while the number of leaders noticeably shrank. These nine years coincided with the rapid rise of Big Tech and the triumph of artificial intelligence. This skew amplifies the risks of a potential sell-off among market leaders.
My conclusion as an analyst: investors are far better off putting their money into diversified index funds than trying to pick specific stocks on their own. The market always rewards only a small group of winners, and today that group has become even smaller. This is not an anomaly but a fundamental feature of the stock market, which investors ignore at their own peril.