Winner Take All?

Is the stock market “winner take all”? Just 1.3 percent of the world’s public companies account for all the market gains during the past three decades, according to a new study from a professor at Arizona State’s Business School. Outside the U.S., the gains are even more concentrated, with less than 1 percent of all equities driving all of the net appreciation in share prices.

From 1990 to 2018, just five companies - Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.Com, Alphabet Inc. (Google) and Exxon Mobil - accounted for 8.3 percent of global net wealth creation. But those five companies account for just 0.008 percent of the total sample set of 62,000 publicly traded companies.

During that 1990-2018 period, the best-performing 811 companies accounted for the entire net stock market appreciation of $44.7 trillion (in excess of the returns you could get from Treasury bills).  Meanwhile, a majority of stocks - 37,195, or 60.9 percent - were net money losers, subtracting a $21.83 trillion from the total.