Best Investments Over the Last 100 Years? Almost All Are Tech Companies.
When you step back and look at the stock market over the last 100 years, what you will find is that a tiny group of publicly traded companies has accounted for nearly all of the profits for investors over the entire century.Most of the top performers are tech companies, headed by Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft.What’s startling is that both Tesla and, if only briefly, SpaceX, two of Elon Musk’s companies, have muscled their way onto that list of superb performers.While these elite stocks churned out spectacular returns, more than 96 percent of the stock market did virtually nothing for investors over long periods.
This vast majority of stocks couldn’t even match the 3.3 percent average return of one-month Treasury bills — basically, the return you could get month-by-month over those 100 years, without taking any appreciable risk.These findings come from the latest update to a long-running study by Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University who has provided a trove of essential and provocative data about stock market investing.The study has aimed to ferret out long-term wealth creators since 1926, when the data available to Professor Bessembinder begins.
The rise of the tech giants, and the relative decline of every other sector of the market, has radically changed the rankings over the last decade, and over shorter periods as well.For example, Tesla didn’t make the list of top wealth creators nine years ago, when an earlier version of the study ended.The firm now ranks ninth among all publicly traded companies over the century.
Even more striking, when Professor Bessembinder ran the numbers at my request on June 16, a few days after SpaceX’s initial public offering, the company made the top 30 all-time list, though its falling share price has since moved it out of that rarefied world.“We’ve had very high returns for extraordinarily large firms in recent years, and the first few days of SpaceX as a public company were a case ...