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Where a decade of stock returns actually landed

The last decade was a strong one for American equities, better than three-quarters of any ten-year stretch since 1928. But inside the index, the returns were startlingly concentrated. This is where a decade of returns actually landed for the thousand largest companies in the world, and why the average company and the typical one are not the same thing.

By Jonathan Castella, CFA · 5 min read
The New York Stock Exchange

The last ten years were a good stretch for American equities. An S&P 500 tracker, the iShares IVV, returned about +321% over the decade to 30 June 2026, roughly +15.4% a year with dividends reinvested. Set that against the long record. In Aswath Damodaran's data back to 1928, the S&P 500 has compounded at 10.0% a year; a dollar invested in 1928 would be worth around $11,600 by the end of 2025.1 The last decade ran well ahead of the century norm.


How far ahead? Roll a ten-year window through every year since 1928 and rank them by cumulative return. Our decade's +321% beat 78% of the eighty-nine ten-year periods on record. It sits well to the right of the typical decade, +183% (about 11% a year), though short of the best: the post-war 1949 to 1959 stretch returned +525%. A strong decade, then, not a record one, and the backdrop for everything that follows. If the index itself had an unusually good ten years, the real question is how the companies inside it actually fared.

So I built an Equity Watchlist of the thousand most important listed companies in the world as they stand today, and measured each one's total return over the same ten years.3 Here is where they landed.


Of the thousand, 789 have a full ten-year record. The average company returned +12.9% a year; the median returned +11.8%, a little more than a point lower. The distinction is the whole point. The median is the return with as many companies above it as below it; the average is pulled higher by outliers. The largest of them is Nvidia, the best performer in the set, up +17,261% over the decade, or +67.5% a year. One name like that lifts the average without moving the median at all.

Before going further, look at the same data drawn a second way: not annualised, but as the full ten-year cumulative return. What reads as a one-point gap per year opens into a chasm.


The average is now +434% and the median +205%. Same companies, same decade; only the arithmetic changed. Annualising compresses the winners (Nvidia's +17,261% becomes a much tamer +67% a year) and hides the skew. Compounded out over ten years, the skew is impossible to miss, and the distance between the gold pill and the purple one is the cost of missing the few companies that ran away from the field.

A few things follow. Over this decade, owning equities beat the alternatives decisively. Cash, measured by the BIL Treasury-bill fund, returned +24% (+2.2% a year). Inflation ran +39% (+3.4%). US Treasuries returned +8% (+0.8%). Gold, the strongest of the four, returned +191% (+11.3%). The typical company cleared cash, inflation and bonds with room to spare, and gold was the close call, beaten by only about half the field. Against other equity markets the picture splits. The universe outpaced Europe's STOXX 600 (+157%, +9.9%) and emerging markets (+126%, +8.5%), which most companies beat. But the S&P 500 itself (+321%, +15.4%) was the hard benchmark: only a third of the thousand largest companies on earth beat it, because the index's cap weighting funnels its return into the same handful of names in the right tail.

There is a limitation worth naming plainly: survivorship bias. The watchlist was built to hold the top thousand companies as of 30 June 2026, so it contains no Credit Suisse, no WeWork, no Theranos, and none of the firms that simply drifted out of the top thousand on poor performance. The losers are absent, which flatters every figure above. And yet the sample still makes one thing vivid: how much of the result rests on a few names. Strip out the top 1%, the eight best (Nvidia, AMD, Micron, argenx, Comfort Systems, SK Hynix, Seagate and Lam Research), and the average ten-year return of the entire set falls from +434% to +351%. Eight companies out of 789 carried eighty points of it.

There is one study, now a classic in financial research, that does not suffer from this survivorship bias: Hendrik Bessembinder's analysis of all 29,754 US public stocks over the century from 1926 to 2025.2 Because it counts every company that ever listed, including the ones that failed, it reaches the same conclusion from the other direction. Wealth creation is astonishingly concentrated: just 46 companies account for half of the $91 trillion the market produced. More soberly, the median stock's lifetime buy-and-hold return was −6.9%, and nearly six in ten left their long-term owners with less money than they put in. The lesson is not that stock-picking is easy. It is the opposite. You need the homeruns, you need the Nvidias, because it is the width of the gap between the average and the median that decides whether a portfolio is carried by the few or sunk by the many.

Socrates on Investing is an editorial publication, not investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or fund. The author may have a position in the assets discussed; specific positions, where material, are disclosed within each article. Past performance does not predict future results. Investing involves risk, including the risk of partial or total loss of principal.

Sources

  1. Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern, “Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds and Bills: 1928 to 2025” (histretSP dataset). pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar
  2. Hendrik Bessembinder, “One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets,” SSRN, March 2026. ssrn.com/abstract=6438198
  3. Socrates on Investing, Equity Watchlist (EODHD daily total returns) and Portfolio Backtest data (SPDR BIL, iShares GOVT, iShares IVV, iShares STOXX 600, SPDR Gold, Vanguard EM), decade to 30.06.2026. socrates-on-investing.com/en-equity-watchlist
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