Just 14 stocks have created 20% of all stock market gains in dollars since 1924.

[Else You Are Mad]

In what truly is one of the most amazing statistics to ever come across our desks here at 24/7 Wall St., we recently saw a chart that showed that just 14 stocks have created 20% of all stock market gains in dollars since 1924. That is a phenomenal figure, considering the sheer number of companies that have come and gone in that time, and the overall wealth created in the stock market in the past 93 years.

The chart, which was sourced from Bloomberg/Henrik Bessembinder through a Jefferies research piece, contains many companies that have been around for years, but also sports four tech companies, albeit one has been around since 1911.

In a remarkable and striking similarity, all the companies on the list are still incredibly relevant and are still outstanding investment ideas, depending on your risk tolerance.

Here are the 14 stocks that have created 20% of all the stock market gains since 1924. They are listed from the largest to the smallest in term of percentage of wealth creation, and we also included when they were started.

You can read the rest at:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/just-14-stocks-created-20-132530388.html


The top 14 are:

1. Exxon Mobil Corp
2. Apple Inc
3. General Electric Co.
4. Microsoft Corp.
5. International Business Machines Corp.
6. Altria Inc.
7. General Motors Co.
8. Johnson & Johnson
9. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
10. Procter & Gamble Co.
11. Chevron Inc.
12. Coca-Cola Co.
13. AT&T Inc.
14. Amazon.com Inc.

[unblock]

1. this sounds very stupid.

"in a remarkable and striking similarity, all the companies on the list are still incredibly relevant".

um, duh?

you cherry picked the best performers! of course they're big companies today! if they had gone out of business or otherwise declined, they wouldn't be in your cherry-picked list, now would they?



aside from that, i'm not clear how meaningful it is to identify enough top performers to equal the overall market growth. stupid data mining exercise.

[unblock]

2. let me give an example:

i have a class of students and give a test and the second test showed improvement.

here are the improvements by students:

-5 points (5 students)
+1 point (25 students)
+5 points (1 student)

if i add up all the numbers, the entire class improved by 5 points.

is it in any way meaningful to say "all the class gains are attributable to the one student that improved by 5 points" when 26 out of 31 students improved?

[zipplewrath]

3. Well, yes it would

I mean it's a bit hard to know because I don't know the relative value of 1 point. Is that 1 out of 5 possible points? But there is a suggestion that the vast majority of the class didn't improve very much. It could be possible that you had only one student show any real improvement and 5 that showed significant declines, with everyone else basically not making any real progress.

I agree that this is one of those factoids that is of limited interest. Most of those companies have been around so long, and merged with others, that it isn't clear exactly what this factoid really indicates. Yeah, Amazon is on there but that's a bit of a "divide by zero" thing in that it started out practically worthless and so yeah, it represents a lot of gain.

[unblock]

4. i agree that it's hard to give it any meaning without more info on the methodology

but in any event it seems silly, as if the gains of lesser companies are irrelevant because they picked the 14 best companies and the rest of the gainers merely offset the losers.

i could just as well do it the other way around. would it be meaningful to say the top 6 (or whatever) gainers merely offset the losers? or is that supposed to be impressive, hey, just 6 top gainers covered all the losers over 90+ years?


if they ignored losers and said something like 90% of the gains among gainers are attributable to just 14 stocks out of 10,000, well, then that says something about the distribution. but if losers are factored in, i'm not sure how meaningful it is. at least not as an isolated factoid.

[brooklynite]

5. Apple.....

Bought my shares for 65c each.