Contents
- The 30 Best Stocks of the Past 30 Years
- SEE ALSO: 101 Best Dividend Stocks for 2019 and Beyond
- Access Our Exclusive Report and Upcoming ‘2023 Global Forecast’ Webinar on VC+
- Monster Beverage Corp (MNST)
- Bottom Line: The Best Performing Stock Can Still Help You Retire Rich
- SEE ALSO: Best Vanguard Mutual Funds for Your Retirement Savings
All seven of these companies are highly recognizable because they have had great success in recent decades. The lifetime percentage gains of Apple’s stock is an astonishing 373,000%. In 1993, you could have acquired a share of Boeing’s stock for less than $10. Tesla still has excellent potential for the future because the electric vehicle industry is only just getting started. With a diverse collection of media entertainment platforms, Disney continues to be an incredibly popular investment.
Not surprisingly, that popularity, along with the company’s distribution and marketing reach, made the stock the best on the market over the past 50 years when including reinvested dividends. A dollar invested in Altria in 1968 turned into $6,638 by 2015 with dividends reinvested, good for a 663,700% total return, or 20.6% annually. While we have seen companies across different sectors do well since their inception, technology giants have performed exceptionally well in the last twenty years. The ability of these companies to innovate and identify new revenue streams has kept their businesses thriving. This is what makes them some of the best-performing stocks in the market.
To help with that, we’ve compiled a list of the best stocks in the S&P 500, measured by year-to-date return. Gilead Sciences is a pharmaceutical company founded three decades ago and has been in a continuous uptrend until 2015. It was its foray into retroviral drugs that made Gilead one of the biggest biotechnology firms in the world. The company has a strong line of products, some of which were obtained through acquisitions. Share prices have been volatile since 2015 as the company has been acquiring new companies to find another breakthrough.
- Its dividend dates back to 1976 and has gone up every year since.
- That’s the mid-range of the 5% to 7% guidance that management was offering pre-pandemic.
- Formerly, he was responsible for managing and co-managing over $600MM in assets for private households and institutions.
- Basically, when you look at the most proven quality metrics in history, Altria stands out as a blue-chip you can trust with your hard-earned savings.
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. Idexx Laboratories provides veterinary diagnostics, practice-management software, and biological testing in more than 175 countries. Its products and services are used to treat small pets, livestock, and poultry, to test water quality and dairy products, and to analyse human patients’ electrolytes and blood gases. Founded in 1934, Old Dominion Freight Line operates as a very efficient trucking company in the “less than truckload ” space.
The 30 Best Stocks of the Past 30 Years
Today’s investors are banking on investments in oncology drugs and splashy acquisitions such as the $11.9 billion deal for Kite Pharma to make up for slowing sales of its retroviral hits. To compile the list, MarketWatch reviewed the current S&P 500 constituents and excluded any stocks that have traded in their present form for less than 10 years. The remaining companies were sorted based on their total return, with reinvested dividends, from December 31, 2009 to December 5, 2019. Exxon is one of those old horses that has created a significant amount of wealth for its shareholders over several decades. The stock was characterized by a reliable and growing dividend payment for a really long time. Even so, there has been significant downward pressure on its price.
Union Pacific Railroad was an original component of the Dow Jones transportation average, created in 1884. The rail company has evolved over the past century and a half due to a series of mergers with or acquisitions of other railroads. The modern-era Union Pacific was formed in 1969 to manage what had become a spaghetti-like mix of routes. Warren Buffett once held a 2% stake in Union Pacific, but sold it when Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) bought competitor BNSF in 2009.
Dividend income has also been a substantial source of income for shareholders. Microsoft’s focus on enterprise customers and – most importantly – its shift to selling cloud-based services such as Azure and Office 365 have been an astounding success. Today, Microsoft is a dominant player in cloud computing, and the stock price shows it. Shares in Microsoft, which joined the Dow in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, generated a total return of 57,730% from 1990 to 2020. The S&P 500’s total return comes to a mere 1,950% over the same span. Including dividends, shares in Home Depot rose about 1,240% over the past decade, according to data from YCharts.
SEE ALSO: 101 Best Dividend Stocks for 2019 and Beyond
Please note that such trading analysis is not a reliable indicator for any current or future performance, as circumstances may change over time. Before making any investment decisions, you should seek advice from independent financial advisors to ensure you understand the risks. During the last twenty years, different sectors and industries have transcended to new levels, mostly through merger and acquisition strategies. The two most prominent segm ents are biotechnology and technology, both of which have significantly expanded over the last twenty years. Here is the list of five stocks that have been the best long-term investments, yielding high returns.
Amoco opened its first service station in 1912 and later moved into oil and gas exploration. Oil giant BP acquired Amoco in 1998, the combined companies became the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the U.S. Soon after, Amoco’s ubiquitous service stations were rebranded BP.
For example, a company with the price/earnings ratio of 14 means it takes 14 years of earnings to repay the price. (Earnings is the amount that a company earns in one year.) Normally this ratio ranges around 12-18, and the higher it is the more overvalued the a complete guide to the futures markets stock is in current earnings terms. Here is a list of the 9 best performing long-term stocks discussed in Best Performimg Stocks for All Time. Available only with a Premier Membership, you can base a Stock Screener off the symbols currently on the page.
Prior to its Chapter 11 filing and delisting from the New York Stock Exchange, the shares created an impressive amount of wealth, paying out over $64 billion in dividends to its shareholders. “GM common stock was one of the most successful stocks in terms of lifetime wealth creation for shareholders in aggregate, despite its ignoble ending,” says Bessembinder. Although the original GM stock was one of the great winners of the last century, its recent fortunes haven’t been as bright. Shares in the new GM are up just 34% since the 2010 initial public offering.
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. Warren Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile manufacturer, in the early 1960s. As it quickly became clear that U.S. textile manufacturing was in decline, Buffett decided to shift gears. By the late 1960s Buffett had already diversified into banking, insurance and newspaper publishing. Berkshire is now a holding company comprised of dozens of diverse businesses selling everything from underwear to insurance policies . Berkshire has also been a vehicle for Buffett to invest in stocks, which he has done shrewdly and successfully.
I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. There are no risk-free companies and no company is right for everyone. You earn Buffett-like returns for many years or even decades to come. In the comments of every Altria article you’ll frequently read things like “Altria has delivered negative returns for five years, proving it’s a bad company”. That means analysts expect 4% to 7% CAGR long-term growth from MO, with most expecting about 6%. That’s the mid-range of the 5% to 7% guidance that management was offering pre-pandemic.
Access Our Exclusive Report and Upcoming ‘2023 Global Forecast’ Webinar on VC+
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. a complete guide to the futures market By the late 1950s it was the most popular brand of gasoline and one of the earliest sponsors of the nascent television industry. Such was its success that it managed to become a top-50 wealth creator despite ending its run as a standalone company 16 years ago.
The S&P 500 generated a total return of 373% over the same period. Founded in 1968, INTC is an old-timer among technology companies, and the chipmaker’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 also remains the biggest player in making CPUs for back-end servers, which are very much in demand to power the rapid shift to cloud-based computing. It was included in the S&P 500 index in 1988 and added to the Dow in 1999.
Idexx has grown revenues from $367 million in 2000 to $2.2 billion in 2018, and net income more than tenfold to $377 million over the same period. Ross Stores has grown its revenue from $2.7 billion in the year to February 2001 to $15 billion last fiscal year, and net income from about $152 million to $1.6 billion over the ingot forex same period. The 10 best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 index since 2000 are listed below, starting with number 10. He’s also written for Esquire magazine’s Dubious Achievements Awards. True, AAPL stock traded sideways for the first few years of the 21st century, but an explosion of innovation soon put an end to that.
Monster Beverage Corp (MNST)
Nevertheless, the integrated energy giant sure had a heck of a run. Over the past 30 years, amid cycles of oil booms and oil busts, XOM generated more than $437 billion in wealth. Shareholders can thank the company’s policy of regular dividend increases for much of that windfall. Exxon Mobil’s dividend payments have grown at an average annual rate of 6.1% over the last 38 years. A series of acquisitions and partnerships have been critical to driving the company’s outsized wealth creation over the past three decades. The company’s holdings and investments are vast, and include U.S. biotechnology company Genentech, Hoffmann-La Roche France, Ventana Medical Systems and Disetronic Holding AG.
Microsoft is another giant in the technology space that has been a treat to its shareholders. It was founded in 1975, and it gained popularity after launching the Windows operating system. Unlike many other fast-growing technology firms, Microsoft does distribute dividends to its shareholders.
Bottom Line: The Best Performing Stock Can Still Help You Retire Rich
Include dividends, however, and WMT’s total return comes to 3,890%. 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.
Apple
Many years and many mergers later, one of those Baby Bells, SBC Communications , acquired the original AT&T in 2005 and adopted the AT&T name. Today, the new AT&T remains a big dividend payer and a major player in wireless, Internet and satellite-TV services, with more than $163 billion in annual revenue. However, because SBC had been a Dow component since 1999, the new AT&T lived on as a Dow component until 2015, when it was removed from the industrial average to make room for Apple . The biotech industry has long held allure for investors looking for outsized returns, and Amgen is part of the reason why. The world’s largest biopharmaceutical company has created an eye-popping level of wealth for shareholders in its relatively short life.
The ranking, which was first published in 2010, may exclude newer or smaller hedge funds that outperformed on a percentage basis. Altria Group is the rebranded name for Phillip Morris, maker of tobacco products including Marlboro cigarettes. In 2003, it changed its name to Altria Group and spun off its international operations as Phillip Morris International in 2008.