The Few That Matter: Why Most Stocks Are Duds—and That’s Where the Fortune’s Hidin’

They say patience is a virtue. In investing, it’s also your only damn shot at greatness.

The financial world loves a myth. The myth of the savvy trader who buys low, sells high, and makes a killing before lunch. The myth of the perfect stock picker, the genius who spotted Amazon in 1997 and got out at the top. The myth of control. These myths are delicious. They’re also mostly nonsense.

The truth is far less glamorous and infinitely more powerful: a handful of stocks are responsible for nearly all the wealth ever created in the public markets. Just a few. Like, really few.

Hendrik Bessembinder, a professor with the charisma of an Excel spreadsheet and the mind of a statistical assassin, crunched the numbers. He looked at nearly a century’s worth of U.S. stock market data and found that just 4% of all publicly traded companies generated the entirety of net market gains since 1926. The other 96%? They were mostly noise, rounding errors, or catastrophic failures with clever logos.

So if your strategy is to play the field, pick the good ones, cut the losers, and ride into the sunset? Good luck. You’ve probably sold the lottery ticket before the numbers came in.

Most Stocks Are Garbage. Long Live the Few.

Let’s say you buy 20 stocks. You diversify, you rebalance, you even read a few shareholder letters because you’re classy like that. Most of ‘em? Duds. Plain and simple. Ten will go nowhere. Six will drift into irrelevance. Two will break your heart and curse your broker. But if just one is the next Tesla, Nvidia, or Apple—and you hold on like a cowboy on a bull—you’ve struck gold. Real gold.

I know this not from theory but from a bit of bruised experience.

Years ago, a good friend of mine told me something I’ll never forget. “Don’t sell your winners,” he said. “Just hold. Especially the great ones.” It sounded like Jedi nonsense at the time. What do you mean, just hold? We’re humans—antsy creatures by design. And so, against that advice, I sold.

I sold Tesla after a solid 2x gain, thinking it had run too far. I sold Nvidia long before AI became the new religion during the Covid panic. I sold Apple when it tripled, congratulating myself on a “disciplined exit.” I made gains—sure. Enough to brag at a barbecue. But had I just held—as my friend pleaded—I’d be sitting on hundreds of thousands more. Maybe a million. Maybe houses, plural.

That lesson? It branded itself onto my investing soul. Because the ones that make you rich rarely look like it at first. And they definitely don’t ring a bell when it’s time to hold.

The Long Tail of Triumph

Investing is not a game of averages. It’s a game of outliers. A few stocks will go to the moon. The rest will dig holes. But the moon-walkers? They make up for the rest. And then some.

So what’s the golden rule?

Hold long enough to find out if you’ve got one.

You don’t trim Michael Jordan in the second quarter. You don’t cut Picasso off after the first sketch. And you sure as heck don’t let a few duds spook you out of your seat before the real show starts.

Don’t sell generational companies at 2x or 3x returns and expect to build generational wealth. Let them run—even when your emotions beg you not to.

Risk Isn’t What You Think It Is

Yes, companies go bankrupt. Yes, the market crashes. But you know what’s even riskier?

Selling your future millionaire-maker because it feels “too high.” Or because your favourite YouTuber thinks it’s “priced for perfection.” The greatest risk is not owning a loser. It’s abandoning a winner before it does what winners do.

That’s not risk tolerance. That’s emotional sabotage.

The Real Rule: Own Enough. Hold Long. Let the Math Work.

There’s no TikTok sound bite for this, but it’s the most boringly powerful strategy in the world:

• Own 15–30 quality companies.
• Let your thesis—not the chart—guide your decisions.
• Sell only when something’s fundamentally broken, not because it got “too big.”
• Let compounding do the heavy lifting. That’s its job.

Remember: your portfolio isn’t a garden. You don’t need to prune it every season. It’s a forest—and forests thrive on letting time do its slow, messy, magnificent work.

Final Thought: What If the Game Isn’t Rigged—It’s Just Slow?

Everyone wants the edge. The secret signal. The fast lane. But maybe the edge is this: patience in a world that forgot how to wait.

Maybe success in investing isn’t about finding the next big thing or having diamond hands. It’s about recognizing it once you own it—and then doing the hardest, smartest, most counterintuitive thing of all:

Nothing.

I didn’t listen the first time. Maybe you won’t either. But if you’ve got a few great companies in your hands, don’t let go just because your gut gets twitchy or your neighbour brags about his crypto gains.

Because in this game, it ain’t the crowd that makes you rich.

It’s the outlaws, the outliers—the few that break away from the herd.

And they only pay out if you’ve got the grit to wait while the duds keep dud-ing.