Lesson of the century: Most US stocks can't even beat a T-bill

Research results reinforce the importance of portfolio diversification and show why many actively managed investments often underperform their benchmarks.

Professor of Finance Hank Bessembinder studied nearly nine decades of U.S. stock and bond performance and found that 58 percent of shares fail to outperform U.S. Department of the Treasury bills in their lifespan. In this BloombergMarkets post on Feb. 1, 2017:

Slightly more than four out of every seven stocks do not outperform Treasury bills over their lives,” the professor wrote in the draft paper published in SSRN, a repository of academic research.