100-Year Research: Only a Handful of Stocks Drive Wall Street

The movement of global stock markets in recent years has been largely supported by a handful of giant technology companies. In the United States (US), a group of stocks including Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and Tesla is even nicknamed the “Magnificent Seven” or “Big Seven” for dominating the rise in stock indices. Previously, the market also knew the FANG group, an acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, with Apple sometimes included in that group. This phenomenon often leads to the perception that the stock market is “thin”, meaning only a few large stocks are rising while the majority of other stocks are left behind. Many analysts consider such conditions a signal that the market is vulnerable to corrections. Over nearly the last 100 years, most of the stock market’s gains have indeed come from a few large companies. Research on nearly 30,000 stocks from 1926 to 2025 shows that the average market return reached more than 30,000 per cent. In contrast, the median stock recorded a return of minus 6.9 per cent. This means that the majority of stocks actually do not generate significant profits for investors in the long term. “Only 46 companies contributed half of the wealth created by the stock market over the last 100 years,” wrote Bessembinder in his research. According to Bessembinder, the US stock market generated wealth of around $91 trillion or equivalent to Rp 1,581,307 trillion over the last century, using an exchange rate of Rp 17,377 per US dollar. By comparison, a $1 investment in the stock market since 1926 has grown to $15,401 or about Rp 267.6 million.