Amazon’s 49,000 percent gain: The most super of superstocks since 1926

In working paper, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” by Professor of Finance Hendrik Bessembinder, he found that individual stocks are a gamble. An extremely small percentage of them have done well, and when gains and losses are added up over their lifetimes, most stocks haven’t made any money.

Out of the 25,782 companies that were publicly traded from 1926 through 2015, only 30 stocks made strong returns in the long run, and Amazon is one of them. This is according to a post in The Wall Street Journal on May 16, 2017, in which Professor of Finance Hendrik Bessembinder is quoted:

As finance professor Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University has shown, only 0.33 percent of all companies that were part of the U.S. stock market at any point over those nine decades accounted for half of all the wealth generated for investors. And fewer than 1.1 percent of all the stocks that existed created three-quarters of the stock market's cumulative dollar gains — as measured relative to the returns on cash.