Join Robin Wigglesworth, a contributor from FT Alphaville, and Hendrik Bessembinder, a renowned professor known for his extensive stock research, as they delve into the staggering results of Bessembinder’s analysis of top-performing stocks over the last century. Discover how one stock achieved an unbelievable 265,528,900% return. They also explore the power of compounding, the challenges facing traditional versus tech industries, the debate between passive and active investing, and the quirks of leveraged ETFs in today’s market.
The discussion highlights the significant disparity in retirement savings access for workers employed by smaller businesses, emphasizing the urgent need for innovative retirement solutions.
Investors are urged to adopt long-term strategies focusing on companies with consistent performance, as compounding growth significantly outpaces the average market returns.
Deep dives
Challenges for Smaller Employers in Offering Retirement Plans
A significant portion of the U.S. population lacks access to workplace retirement plans, particularly among smaller employers with fewer than 100 employees. This gap in retirement savings is coming to the forefront as discussions focus on how to provide retirement solutions for this demographic. The current landscape highlights the need for innovative strategies that enable small businesses to offer effective retirement options, ensuring that their employees can begin saving for the future. Addressing these challenges is crucial for improving overall financial security for a large segment of the workforce that remains underserved.
The Value of Long-Term Stock Performance
The discussion emphasizes the importance of long-term investment strategies, particularly in identifying stocks with consistent performance over time. Companies like Boeing and General Dynamics have demonstrated impressive compound growth, yielding substantial returns despite recent challenges or less glamorous business models. The concept of compounding wealth illustrates how steady, reliable growth, such as an annual return of around 15%, can lead to astronomical gains over significant periods. Investors are encouraged to focus on businesses capable of sustained performance rather than short-lived market trends.
Stock Market Realities: Concentration of Wealth and Risks
Data reveals a troubling reality in the stock market, where a small number of companies account for the majority of wealth generation. While the average return has been positive, the median stock has often underperformed, indicating that many stocks consistently lose value. This highlights the risk of relying on individual stock selection without a diversified approach, as most stocks fail to deliver expected returns. The findings reinforce the argument for passive investing, where owning a broad array of stocks may provide a better chance of benefiting from the few exceptional performers that drive overall market growth.
How would you like a 265,528,900 per cent return on your investment? Would you be interested in that? If so, join us as Rob Armstrong and FT Alphaville’s Robin Wigglesworth discuss the results of Professor Hendrik Bessembinder’s massive number-crunching project, which ranks the best stocks of the past century. The number one performer is pretty incendiary. Also we short break dancing and go triple reverse long on single-stock ETFs.