We study compound returns to nearly 62,000 global common stocks during the 1990 to 2018 period, documenting that the majority, 56% of US stocks and 61% of non-US stocks, under perform one-month US Treasury bills over the full sample. Focusing on aggregate shareholder wealth creation measured in...

Firms with the best decade-horizon shareholder outcomes differ substantially on average from other firms in terms of characteristics that can be observed and objectively measured during the same decade. Most notably, top-performing firms have rapid asset growth, and in particular have strong...

This study reports on decade-horizon outcomes for investors in U.S. common stocks since 1950. Despite the stellar performance of investments in firms such as Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, Technology stocks as a group are more likely to appear on a list of the worst rather than best performers....

Even those long-term shareholders who were rewarded with the greatest cumulative returns endured large price declines over shorter intervals. I study shareholder wealth creation for all publicly-listed U.S. common stocks during each of the seven decades since 1950. Focusing on the 100 most...

Kolari, Pynnonen, and Tuncez rely on simulation outcomes to criticize the normalization of firm characteristics employed by Bessembinder and Zhang (2013) to assess returns after major corporate events. However, their simulation outcomes simply verify that a non‐linear normalization is...

It is often asserted that futures investors periodically pay or receive the difference in futures prices across contracts with different delivery dates. This "roll yield" is mythical - no such cash flow occurs, at the time of "roll" trades or on any other date. While the term is a misnomer, the...

Four out of every seven common stocks that have appeared in the CRSP database since 1926 have lifetime buy-and-hold returns less than one-month Treasuries. When stated in terms of lifetime dollar wealth creation, the best-performing four percent of listed companies explain the net gain for the...