@Buffalo Chip - wow, what a great study! Thanks for posting.
I've never seen any of the original research on this. Bookmarking. Just reading the first few pages is eye opening.
58% of stocks underperform one month Treasuries through the entire life of the big CRSP database (NYSE+NASDAQ+Amex, 1926-2015)...
4% of stocks account for all of the gains in the market...
less than half of monthly CRSP returns are positive...
more than half of stocks deliver lifetime negative returns...
less than one-third of one percent of the stocks produced more than half of the gains...
Plus the simulations to analyze the single stock strategy:
single-stock strategy underperformed value-weighted market in 96% of simulations
single-stock strategy underperformed equal-weighted market in 99% of simulations
And the study included all stocks that were delisted from the exchanges in question.
Holy cow.