By Vildana Hajric
(Bloomberg) -- Two years ago, an Arizona State University professor made waves with a study showing all the wealth created by U.S. stocks is the result of gains in a weirdly small group of companies. Now he’s back with an update that shows the situation is no cheerier in the rest of the world.
Hendrik Bessembinder, a 62-year-old researcher in financial market design, and his team sifted through about 62,000 stocks traded in more than 40 countries between 1990 and 2018. Their finding: about 60% were such duds they did worse than one-month U.S. Treasury notes. The proportion was even greater than in the initial study, which focused on the U.S.
The findings have implications for everything from wealth creation to the math measuring investor skill, but got the most notice in the active-vs-passive debate. Since big gains are so rare and yet so crucial to overall returns, it helps explain why stock pickers struggle to keep up with indexes.
“It is historically the norm in the U.S. and around the world that a few top-performing companies have great influence over how the market does overall,” Bessembinder, a professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State, said by phone. “It’s the norm and I expect it to be the case in the future.”
It’s the observation that so few do so much for so many when it comes to the generous gains offered by share indexes. While the equity market as a whole created over $44 trillion in shareholder wealth between 1990 and 2018 and beat Treasury notes, the total is reliant on gigantic, compounding returns from a just a handful of companies, the report says.
By themselves, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp. accounted for more than 8% of global net wealth creation during the period. Most of the rest generated negative wealth.
Investors have heard this refrain before, that just a scant few pull the pack. And it’s easy to see their outsize influence: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.com and Facebook Inc. account for more than 20% of the S&P 500’s returns this year. That number is even starker for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, for instance, where those four companies account for about 50% of gains.
But Bessembinder and his team, including two co-authors from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Goeun Choi of Arizona State, are among the first to look at the phenomenon long-term. The best-performing 306 firms accounted for about three-quarters of global net wealth creation during the 28-year period of the study, they found. Just 811 companies could be framed as accounting for all of it.
Their findings echo Bessembinder’s previous work. In looking at nearly nine decades of U.S. stock and bond performance, he found that out of 26,000 stocks, about 58% underperform Treasury bills in their lifespan.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Vildana Hajric in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Jeremy Herron at [email protected]
Chris Nagi
