Sorting nearly a century of U.S. stocks by their lifetime cumulative return shows how uneven the distribution is. The single largest group is the one that lost money, covering about half of the more than 29,000 companies in the sample. At the other end, roughly one in ten cleared a tenfold gain, and that tail is where essentially all of the net wealth the market created above the return on cash came from.
Source: Hendrik Bessembinder, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?,” 2024, using CRSP data from December 1925 to December 2023