This study, "Which U.S. Stocks Generated the Highest Long-Term Returns?", examines the compound returns of all publicly traded common stocks in the CRSP database from 1925 to 2023. The author, Hendrik Bessembinder, discovers that while over half of these stocks experienced negative returns, a small number of stocks generated remarkably high cumulative returns, sometimes exceeding 5 million percent. Despite these impressive cumulative returns, the annualized compound returns of these top performers were relatively modest, averaging around 13.5%. The study concludes that time in the market is a crucial factor in achieving long-term investment success.
Paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4897069
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