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A new study spanning 100 years of the U.S. stock market found that nearly 60% of all stocks ever listed left investors worse off than if they had simply kept their money in Treasury bills. The market as a whole still generated about $91 trillion in wealth over that century, but almost all of it came from a tiny group of companies at the very top.
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Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business has tracked the pattern for years. His latest update, covering 1926 through 2025, shows the names at the top have shifted from oil and industrial giants to Big Tech, with two longtime holdouts still ranking among the greatest wealth creators in market history.
How lopsided the stock market really is
Bessembinder doesn’t rank companies solely by share-price gains. Instead, he looks at wealth creation — the dollars a company generates for shareholders above what Treasury bills would have earned over the same period, including dividends and share buybacks.
By that measure, the market is incredibly top-heavy. Just 46 companies account for half of the entire $91 trillion in wealth created, down from 89 companies in his earlier study through 2016.
The top 10 alone make up 29% of that total — nearly one-third of a century’s worth of stock market wealth — despite representing just 10 of the 29,754 common stocks listed on the U.S. public markets.
Nine years ago, the leaderboard looked very different. Through 2016, Exxon Mobil was No. 1, alongside industrial-era names General Electric, International Business Machines (IBM), Altria Group and General Motors.
Today, it looks much more like a tech conference attendee list: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla now occupy eight of the top 10 spots. Apple alone has created 5.5% of all the wealth generated in U.S. stock market history. Nvidia, fueled by the artificial intelligence boom, accounts for another 5%, with most of that wealth created in just the past few years.
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The two names that don’t fit
That leaves an odd couple: Exxon Mobil and Walmart. One is an oil company. The other is a discount retailer. Somehow, both are wedged in among the chipmakers.
They didn’t get there by luck. Exxon Mobil created roughly $1.42 trillion in lifetime shareholder wealth, while Walmart generated about $1.20 trillion. That places Exxon at No. 7 all time and Walmart at No. 10. Together, they’ve created about $2.62 trillion in wealth. Neither relied on a single explosive breakout. Instead, both compounded steadily over decades.
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Exxon Mobil has been a part of the market throughout the entire century Bessembinder studied, appearing in the first month of his data in 1926 and remaining there through 2025. It built its fortune the slow way: by paying dividends year after year. That meant the company didn’t need dramatic stock price gains to make shareholders rich. It consistently returned cash to investors, allowing those payments to compound over time. Exxon has raised its dividend for 43 consecutive years and is now the second-biggest dividend payer in the S&P 500. In 2025 alone, it paid out $17.2 billion in dividends.
Walmart’s story is similar. The retailer has traded publicly since 1970 and has increased its dividend every year since 1974, giving it 53 consecutive annual increases and making it a member of the Dividend Kings — companies that have raised their dividends for at least 50 straight years. Investors who reinvested those increased payouts benefited from decades of compounding.
Compare that with Nvidia. The chipmaker created nearly twice as much shareholder wealth as Exxon and Walmart combined, in a fraction of the time, with most of those gains arriving only recently. Exxon and Walmart reached the top by showing up year after year.
No one knows how long the old standbys will remain on the list or which tech company will elbow its way to the top. When SpaceX went public on June 12 with a valuation topping $2 trillion on its first day of trading, Bessembinder reran his rankings at the request of The New York Times. SpaceX briefly cracked the all-time top 30 before slipping back out as its stock fell.
What this means for your money
The findings offer a cautionary lesson for investors. If Most individual stocks ultimately perform worse than Treasury bills, and only a small handful create almost all of the market’s wealth, the odds of choosing the next Apple before everyone else are slim. That’s one reason why broad index funds make so much sense. You don’t have to guess the winners because you own them all.
There’s another takeaway. The companies driving the market’s gains are becoming increasingly concentrated, and they’re largely the same technology giants that dominate most index funds. When you buy an S&P 500 index fund today, an increasing share of your money is invested in a handful of massive tech companies, whether you intended to make that bet or not.
Exxon and Walmart also serve as a reminder that boring businesses can create enormous wealth over time. If you own the entire market through an index fund, you’ll own those winners too, without having to predict decades in advance which companies they’ll be.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
