The 50 best stocks of all time

Professor of Finance Hendrik Bessembinder wants to let you in on a secret. It's unlikely you'll choose a winner. The trick, he says, is to diversify your portfolio.

Can you guess the winning stocks among the thousands of underperforming ones? Professor of Finance Hendrik Bessembinder advises not to bet on it. He evaluated lifetime returns to every U.S. common stock traded on the New York and American stock exchanges and the Nasdaq for the past 90 years, and most of them performed no better than risk-free, one-month Treasury bills.

In this article on Kiplinger on Jan. 16, 2018:

The results reinforce the importance of diversification,” says Bessembinder, “and low-cost index funds are an excellent way to diversify broadly.