Hendrik Bessembinder has spent years asking one of the most important and counterintuitive questions in investing: if the stock market creates enormous wealth in aggregate, why do most individual stocks fail? In his March 2026 study “One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets,” Bessembinder extended his 2018 research, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” to cover a full century of U.S. market history—every common stock listed between January 1926 and December 2025.

The study encompassed 29,754 stocks issued by 29,081 firms, drawing on the Center for Research in Security Prices database. The picture that emerges is humbling.

A Century of Every U.S. Stock Ever Listed

Bessembinder measured outcomes two ways. The first is the…