Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host David Stein. Today is episode 482. It's titled

Unlocking the Power of Positive Stewness, Strategies for Investing Business and

Creativity. I recently came upon several business and creativity.

I recently came upon several really fascinating studies on the long-term performance of the stock market.

The first study was by Hendrik Bessambinder and his co-authors and the second

study was just by Hendrik Bessambinder who is a professor of finance at Arizona State University.

In the first study, they looked at the long-term returns

of 64,000 global common stocks going from January 1990 to December 2020.

They found that 55% of US stocks and 57% of U.S. stocks and 57% of non-U.S. stocks underperformed one month U.S. Treasury bills.

In other words, their compound return of the majority of stocks didn't even beat cash.

Further, they found that in the US, only 2.4% of the firms contributed to the $76 trillion of global stock market wealth creation.

Outside of the US, 1.4% of the firms contributed

to the 30 trillion dollars in net wealth creation. Only a tiny percent of the stocks generated the vast majority of the wealth.

It's even more narrower than that.

Five firms.

0.008 percent of the total accounted for 10% of global net wealth creation. That was Apple,

Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and cents. 159 firms.

0.25% of the total accounted for half the global net wealth creation.

Now that's the first study.

The second study went for a longer time period. It was just focused on US public stocks from

1926 to 2019. Bessin Binder looked at 26,000 firms and found that only 42% of the firms created

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