The stock has understandably slowed down in the past decade, generating an 81.1% total return. A $10,000 investment in JCI stock in 1992 would now be worth about $5.1 million. Along the way, Microsoft created $1.91 trillion in wealth for shareholders, good for an annualized return of more than 19%. The tobacco company doesn’t have the greatest earnings growth prospects given ever-growing restrictions against its primary product. But it does generate a river of reliable free cash flow, which it returns to shareholders in the form of generous dividends. And MO’s strategy of diversification and innovation has allowed it to deliver steady, if incremental, top-line growth.
But what really changed the company’s fortunes was its often painful transition away from traditional software licensing to providing cloud-based services. It took a while for the market to buy into Oracle’s transformation story, but once it did, the stock returned to its market-beating ways. Analysts project the company to deliver average annual earnings per share growth of 8.4% over the next three to five years. A study of the performance of more than 64,000 global stocks from January 1990 to December 2020 revealed that the compound returns of 55.2% of U.S. stocks, as well as 57.4% of non-U.S. Moreover, the entirety of the $75.7 trillion in net global stock market wealth created over the past 30 years was generated solely by the top-performing 2.4% of stocks. Information provided on Forbes Advisor is for educational purposes only.
If you want to cast a wider net, you could purchase a total stock market fund, which will hold thousands of stocks. Predicting the future of even the current top-performing stocks is a job even the pros haven’t yet mastered. And the best stocks for your portfolio aren’t necessarily the best stocks for someone else’s portfolio. Trying to pick which stocks will perform best over a given day or week can be fun and exciting. However, most investors aren’t short-term traders and market speculators. Instead, the majority of U.S. investors are trying to cultivate a nest egg that will grow over the long term and potentially boost their quality of life in retirement.
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It sells Gatorade sports drinks, Tropicana juices and Aquafina water, among other brands. One advantage Pepsi has over rival Coca-Cola is the Frito-Lay side of the business, as demand for salty snacks remains solid. Add another pharmaceutical maker to the list of the greatest creators of stock market wealth for investors over the 90-year span. A long track record of successful acquisitions has kept the pipeline primed with big-name drugs over the years.
- The world’s largest independent oil exploration and production company was formed by the 2002 merger of Conoco and Phillips Petroleum, both of which had long and successful records in the petroleum industry.
- Dividend kings are slow-growing companies with slow-growing dividends.
- Almost every country has a functional stock market, but not all countries’ stock markets have been performing the same.
- Beyond your own personal risk tolerance and how long you plan to invest, strategic investors do significant research into a company before buying its stock.
- A long, slow recovery followed – it took about 14 years for ORCL to regain its pre-crash peak – driven by a wide portfolio of software aimed at corporate customers.
- Monster was driving 90% of the company’s sales by the time it changed its name to Monster Energy at the beginning of 2012.
The stock is down 50.6% in 2022, but Nvidia’s revenue was up 46.4% in the first quarter. A $10,000 investment in NVDA stock back in 1999 would now be worth $6.7 million. The stock’s 31.1% annualized return is among the highest on this list.
Intuitive Surgical specialises in minimally invasive, robotic-assisted platforms, and services. More than 44,000 surgeons are trained to use its da Vinci surgical system, which has been deployed in more than 5 million procedures, including 1 million last year. The company has installed nearly 5,000 Da Vinci systems in hospitals worldwide, according to its latest annual report. Ansys provides engineering-simulation software and services to customers including General Electric, Samsung, Ford, and Philips. Its offerings are used by engineers, designers, researchers, and students across industries including aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, consumer products, healthcare, and sports. Ross Stores is the largest off-price retailer in the US, offering discounts of 20% to 60% on name-brand apparel, footwear, and other items compared to department and specialty stores.
This methodology aims to identify companies with a demonstrated ability to sustain growth in revenue and earnings in the past and into the future. Filtering out stocks with big price drops helps by adding price stability to the mix. Dollar General has a shareholder yield of 4.8%, thanks to a combination of generous stock buybacks and dividends . The dividend yield is currently 0.9% For the last decade, DG has continually reduced the number of shares outstanding, boosting the yield. Apple is the largest U.S. public company by market capitalization.
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The world’s largest independent oil exploration and production company was formed by the 2002 merger of Conoco and Phillips Petroleum, both of which had long and successful records in the petroleum industry. Conoco, once owned by DuPont, was founded in 1875, and the Phillips story begins in 1917. ConocoPhillips spun off its transportation and refining business in 2012 as Phillips 66 to focus solely on exploration, development and production. That’s what differentiates it today from major integrated energy companies such as ExxonMobil , which also transport and refine oil and natural gas.
True, shares in Cisco are up 266% since the market bottom of March 2009, including dividends, but the Nasdaq-100 index has gained 600% over the same span. Today, the company is reconfiguring itself to take advantage of the growth of cloud-based computing and the Internet of Things. The fifth-largest holding in Baillie Gifford’s U.S. Equity Growth fund is Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify, shares of which have tanked more than 70% in 2022.
For investors, this is likely to equate to consistent growth in profits and free cash flow which should translate into stable, long-term returns and an ever-increasing dividend. The label is reserved for high-quality companies that have withstood the test of time — multinational companies operating for decades, and providing excellent products that people depend on. For companies, old age implies stability and consistency on the stock market. Monster Beverage has vastly outperformed all other S&P 500 stocks since 2000. It sells a range of drinks under brands such as Monster Energy, NOS, and Full Throttle. Its share price has surged from below $0.10 in January 2003 to more than $63, lifting its market value from less than $1 million to almost $35 billion.

That’s partly because management has a knack for changing with the times. Shares performed poorly in the early 2000s, for example, around the https://traderevolution.net/ time the low-carb Atkins diet surged in popularity. McDonald’s responded by adding more healthy fare to its menu and the stock recovered.
A big selling point of TJX is its great deals, and thanks to prices that are low relative to peers, that helps drive customer loyalty, according to Schoenstein. Amid an environment where consumers are facing higher rents, mortgages and home-ownership costs, TJX stands to benefit from the subsequent “trade-down effect” and “bargain theory” as consumers cut back spending. The stock has outperformed xm review broker review the market in 2022—not to mention many other retailers–rising nearly 3%. Despite the two world wars, a cold war, multiple economic crises, and many other global events in the last 120 years, global equity markets have only continued to grow in the long run. It should come as no surprise that the greatest value investor of all time would be behind one of the best stocks of all time.
Profits were reflected in a substantial increase in dividends given by shipping corporations. According to Credit Suisse data, the Australian stock market has offered the most robust returns to investors over the last 120 years, outperforming equities on indexes in the United States and Europe. Since 1900, the ASX has provided actual yearly returns of greater than 6.5 percent when translated into U.S. dollars. JPMorgan Chase traces its roots all the way back to 1799, when The Manhattan Company was chartered to supply clean water to New York City.
Your financial situation is unique and the products and services we review may not be right for your circumstances. We do not offer financial advice, advisory or brokerage services, nor do we recommend or advise individuals or to buy or sell particular stocks or securities. Performance information may have changed since the time of publication. A 10-year holding, off-price department store corporation TJX operates brands like T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, with nearly 4,700 stores across nine countries and three continents. “As people have less money to spend, consumers will be more thoughtful about how they spend—and TJX plays a valuable role from that perspective,” he describes.
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NerdWallet does not and cannot guarantee the accuracy or applicability of any information in regard to your individual circumstances. Examples are hypothetical, and we encourage you to seek personalized advice from qualified professionals regarding specific investment issues. Our estimates are based on past market performance, and past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of SmartMoney, MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, InvestorPlace and DailyFinance. As a senior writer at AOL’s DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and hosted a weekly video segment on equities. Although the dot-com days of the 1990s minted many a “Microsoft millionaire,” the aftermath of the tech bust led MSFT stock to trade mostly sideways for a decade.

Microsoft joined the Dow in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom. It should come as no surprise that many of the top-performing stocks since 1926 are components of the Dow, which dates back to 1896. The popular benchmark is made up of 30 of the bluest blue-chip stocks available to investors, and components change infrequently.
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The performance is all the more remarkable considering most of the best stocks of all time goose their returns by paying out generous dividends for decades. Have you ever wondered what are the best performing stock markets in the world? Almost every country has a functional stock market, but not all countries’ stock markets have been performing the same.
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Bankrate senior reporter James F. Royal, Ph.D., covers investing and wealth management. His work has been cited by CNBC, the Washington Post, The New York Times and more. Headed into 2022, energy stocks were the most undervalued by Morningstar’s calculations. “It’s the sector we now think is the most overvalued,” Sekera said. Microsoft has been another reliable investment over the years because it continues to deliver exceptional revenues every quarter. Apple continues to deliver outstanding technological products that are used by millions of people every single day.
Indeed, no company on this list has created as much wealth as FB has in such a short period of time. A period of intense international growth from 1990 to 2011 made the sprawling packaged food conglomerate what it is today. Its brands are legion, and approximately 30 of them boast annual sales of at least $1 billion. The company’s biggest hitters include Nespresso, Nescafé, Kit Kat, Smarties, Nesquik, Stouffer’s, Vittel and Maggi.
Today’s JPMorgan Chase is a sprawling multinational financial powerhouse that ranks as the nation’s largest bank by assets. Morgan & Co., the stock was added to the Dow in 1991 to reflect not only its place of prominence in the financial industry but its prominence in the American business landscape. Texaco, originally known as The Texas Co., was a staple of the Dow Jones industrial average throughout most of the 20th solution architect century. It was first added to the Dow in 1916, when the average expanded to 20 companies from 12. As part of the merger, Texaco service stations were sold to Shell, now part of oil major Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A). It was an anticlimactic end for one of the last independent oil companies. By the late 1950s it was the most popular brand of gasoline and one of the earliest sponsors of the nascent television industry.
Yet, shares in the nation’s largest home-improvement chain have generated a big chunk of their gains just in the last six years. The collapse of the housing market that precipitated the Great Recession of the late 2000s was a painful period for Home Depot. It’s resurgence since on the back of low mortgage rates – coupled with a shortage of new housing, which has prompted homeowners to stay put and renovate – has remade its fortunes of late. After notching an all-time high in early 2018, it remains to be seen how much upside is left, at least in the short term. The world’s biggest burger chain has been a stock market and dietary staple for decades.
Founded in 1977 and publicly traded since 1986, Oracle got its start as a provider of database management software. As much as any high-tech company of the era, it rode the late-1990s tech bubble to lofty heights — and then crashed. It’s been a long, slow recovery ever since, driven by a wide portfolio of software aimed at corporate customers. Larry Ellison is still with the company after 40 years, though now in the role of chief technology officer. Management, led by co-CEOs Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, is in the midst of a major transformation, trying to reinvent the company and embrace the rush to cloud-based services.
Philip Morris International is a separate publicly traded company that was spun off from Altria in 2008 to sell cigarettes outside the U.S. Intel, founded in 1968, is an old-timer among technology companies, and the semiconductor manufacturer’s longevity has paid off handsomely for shareholders. Its early start positioned the company to run away with the market for the chips that serve as a computer’s brain. Intel had close to 100% market share in central processing units for personal computers at one point.
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