Stats › Individual stocks › Return skew
Only 42.6% of US stocks beat Treasury bills over their life
Sources: Bessembinder 2018 JFE for the US figure, Bessembinder, Chen, Choi and Wei for the global figures. The 4.3% US number is 1,092 firms divided by about 25,300 companies, my arithmetic on his figures. His own published wording is "slightly more than 4%".
Stock returns are positively skewed, so the average is set by a small number of names. Across roughly 25,300 US companies since 1926, only 42.6% beat one month Treasury bills over their listed life. Slightly more than 4% of firms produced all the net wealth.
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