The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that an article in the Financial Analysts Journal says that 55.2 per cent of U.S. stocks and 57.4 per cent of non-U.S. stocks underperform the one-month U.S. Treasury Bill Index over the period 1990 to 2020. Guest columnist Robert Tattersall writes that the study covers 64,000 stocks in 42 markets. Canadian stocks do a little better: Only 53 per cent of them underperform. This appears to contradict the widespread belief that stock returns typically outpace short-term fixed income over the long haul. The authors say that the positive returns observed for stock portfolios or market indexes are driven by very large returns to relatively few stocks. Rather than computing the average return for individual stocks over different time periods, the authors instead compute the wealth creation for a buy-and-hold investor. This is defined as the increase in the end of period wealth to a shareholder as a result of investing in the stock rather than a one-month T-bill. Over the entire sample, 42 per cent of stocks had a positive wealth creation, leaving 58 per cent with a negative score. The top-five wealth creators were (in order): Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Tencent.