T-bills Beat Most Stocks?

Does conventional reward-for-risk wisdom about the long-run performance of the U.S. stock market translate to the typical stock? In the May 2018 update of his paper entitled “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?”, Hendrik Bessembinder compares the performance of the typical U.S. stock to that of the 1-month U.S. Treasury bill (T-bill) over monthly, annual, decade and life-of-stock horizons. He also performs simulations to gauge the effectiveness of holding just one stock and of diversifying across portfolios of five, 25, 50 and 100 stocks. Using monthly total (dividend-reinvested) returns for 25,967 U.S. common stocks while listed during July 1926 through December 2016, he finds that: (more…)