Today’s Chart of the Day is a list by Hendrik Bessembinder from his paper called “Which U.S. Stocks Generated the Highest Long-Term Returns?” published in July 2024. It includes the returns for the 29,078 publicly held stocks from 1925 to 2023 in order of total return.
Notably, 52% of all stocks had a negative cumulative return. However, 17 stocks delivered cumulative returns over 5 million percent (or $50,000 per dollar initially invested). The highest return is 265 million percent (or $2.65 million per dollar initially invested) from the Altria Group, a holding company whose primary businesses are tobacco products.
Many of these top performers have long track records and only had modest annualized returns of 13.47% along the way, thereby affirming the importance of “buy good companies, and hold them forever.”