Bessembinder, H. (2018). Do stocks outperform Treasury bills? Journal of
Financial Economics, 129(3), 440–457. doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2018.06.004
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X18301521
The approximately 25,300 companies that issued stocks appearing in the CRSP
common stock database since 1926 are collectively responsible for lifetime
shareholder wealth creation of nearly $35 trillion.
However, just five firms (Exxon Mobile, Apple, Microsoft, General Electric, and
International Business Machines) account for 10% of the total wealth creation.
The 90 topperforming companies, slightly more than one-third of 1% of the
companies that have listed common stock, collectively account for over half of
the wealth creation. The 1,092 topperforming companies, slightly more than 4%
of the total, account for all of the net wealth creation.
Of all monthly common stock returns contained in the CRSP database from 1926
to 2016, only 47.8% are larger than the one-month Treasury rate in the same
month.
When focusing on stocks’full lifetimes, just 42.6% of common stocks, slightly
less than three out of seven, have a buy-and-hold return (inclusive of
reinvested dividends) that exceeds the return to holding one-month Treasury
bills over the matched horizon.