Singled Out: Historical Performance of Individual Stocks

  • Single stocks have a wide range of returns. Only about a fifth of stocks survive and outperform the market over 20-year periods.

  • They delist at a high rate, even those that have been around for a long time and have outperformed the market for 20 years.

  • The chance of any single stock outperforming the market in the future is not meaningfully different when conditioning on its past performance.