The mining venture didn’t pan out, but the failure did force the company to innovate and branch out. Today, 3M makes 60,000 products, with one-third of sales coming from products invented in the last five years. The company’s legacy of success earned it a spot in the Dow in 1976. 3M’s dividend dates back a century and has increased annually for 59 consecutive years. Union Pacific runs a railroad network that sprawls across 23 states in the West and Midwest, making it one of the largest transport companies in the world.
- Unlike many other fast-growing technology firms, Microsoft does distribute dividends to its shareholders.
- But Disney, a Dow component since 1991, has adapted to a changing media landscape before and recently inked a deal to acquire much of 21st Century Fox (FOXA).
- Rockwell Automation (ROK, $150.13) manufactures and develops software and equipment that companies use to automate their factories.
- A new era began for Abbott in 2013, when it spun off AbbVie (ABBV) as a standalone maker of branded drugs and therapies.
- XOM might not repeat as a top stock of the next 30 years, but it could still be a solid buy-and-hold pick if the dividend hikes keep coming.
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 Forex patterns $1 billion. The company’s biggest hitters include Nespresso, Nescafé, Kit Kat, Smarties, Nesquik, Stouffer’s, Vittel and Maggi. Partly that’s due to the Dow component’s defensive characteristics.
The company is a major defense contractor, manufacturing everything from rockets to satellites to military tilt-rotor aircraft like the Osprey. Boeing’s history reaches back a century, but it really came into its own in the post-World War II period with the explosive growth of commercial aviation. Boeing’s shares have been a long-time market-beater, but they’ve taken off over the past year. Although 2017 returns aren’t included in Bessembinder’s study, the stock price nearly doubled last year — a remarkable one-year return for such an established blue-chip stock.
Unlike PepsiCo, Coca-Cola doesn’t have the equivalent of Pepsi’s Frito-Lay snack business to offset slumping soda sales. Over the past five years, shares in Coca-Cola are up just 24% versus a 64% gain for PepsiCo. At least the company’s commitment to its dividend should be a source of comfort to income investors.
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However, new Comcast stock was issued in 2002 following the merger with AT&T Broadband, so the stunning lifetime returns calculated by Bessembinder were generated over just 14 years. Notably, it bought NBCUniversal in 2011 and DreamWorks Animation in 2016, fueling Comcast’s strategy of becoming a producer of premier films and programming. Comcast’s stock is up 657% on a price basis since the bull market began in March 2009 compared with a gain of 312% for the S&P 500. Conoco, once owned by DuPont, was founded in 1875, and the Phillips story begins in 1917. ConocoPhillips spun off its transportation and refining business in 2012 as Phillips 66 (PSX) to focus solely on exploration, development and production.
Often a staple among top brands, Coca-Cola has been one of the most popular companies in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. While revenue has been on the decline due to an increase in competition from other brands, the company still boasts a high return on equity. In the past, the company has grown by managing to acquire smaller brands and marketing them to increase revenues. Their robust supply chain also ensured that the company was able to enter new markets. The dividend income remains high, along with a tremendous rise in the share price.
Like the rest of the financial services industry, SST has spent the last 50 years in an almost perpetual state of change, compiling a dizzying record of acquisitions, dispositions and other deals. Throughout it all, the firm managed to deliver an annualized total return of nearly 13.7%. For the purposes of Bessembinder’s study, returns for the original Mobil Corp. stopped in 1999, when Mobil merged with Exxon to form today’s energy powerhouse ExxonMobil (XOM). That fact makes the lifetime performance of Mobil stock (original ticker symbol “MOB”) all the more impressive considering it missed out on the current bull market, one of the longest in U.S. history.
Choosing good stocks for your portfolio is a relatively time-consuming task, and you need to look beyond performance metrics like the ones on this page. Yes, it’s a solidly good sign if a stock is able to outperform during periods of market volatility and the broad market declines like we saw in 2022. But as referenced above, there are a number of other factors to consider. Berkshire Hathaway is almost famous, perhaps even notorious, for eschewing dividends, even though many of Buffett’s coveted positions are in dividend-yielding stocks. Sure, Berkshire could give some cash back to shareholders for a few percentage points of extra return. But surely the greatest value investor in history can do better by shareholders by deploying that capital in something more productive.
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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. Boeing, a Dow component since 1987, forms half of the duopoly for large commercial airliners. Only Europe’s Airbus competes with it on the same level in making big jets.
Philip Morris International (PMI) is a separate publicly traded company that was spun off from Altria in 2008 to sell cigarettes outside the U.S. Joining the likes of Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb on this list of top-performing stocks is fellow drug maker Abbott Labs. The company has a long and eventful history that dates to its founding in 1888. Abbott first paid a dividend in 1924, and it has raised its payout annual for the last 46 years in a row. Its many decades as a dividend-paying public company have certainly attributed to the extraordinary lifetime returns of its stock. A new era began for Abbott in 2013, when it spun off AbbVie (ABBV) as a standalone maker of branded drugs and therapies.
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The company offers one-stop shopping for those looking to build, finance and maintain their home. It operates in 40 major cities and is the third largest homebuilder in the US. Home prices have risen steadily over time, particularly in recent decades and most dramatically during the build-up of the housing bubble that peaked in 2005.
The 50 Best Stocks of All Time
The service includes NeMo for large language model applications, BioNeMo for biotechnology and pharmaceutical applications, and Picasso for visual applications. The seeds of that success were planted nearly two decades ago when visionary CEO Jensen Huang began diversifying the business beyond gaming. His excellent leadership positioned Nvidia as a one-stop shop for accelerated data center computing. Pulte Group owns a number of companies related to home building, home mortgages and home insurance.
All-Star US stocks (at least right now)
Income investors should raise a glass to Brown-Forman (BF.B, $47.06). Yet another Dividend Aristocrat, BF.B proves that steady and rising dividends really add up over time. Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA, $69.57) traces its roots back to a single drugstore founded in 1901 and, boy, has it come a long way ever since. It merged with Alliance Boots – a Switzerland-based health and beauty multinational – in 2014 to form the current company. In late 2017, it struck a deal to purchase 1,932 Rite Aid (RAD) stores for $4.38 billion. TJX Companies (TJX, $45.40) proves there’s a lot of money to be made for patient investors in a discount retail chain paying rising dividends.
However, if you’re going to buy individual stocks, you’ll need to research and analyze them, not blindly buy the best performers. That requires a lot of time and energy, and few people want to spend those precious resources. Instead, it may be easier to buy a diversified index fund, such as one based on the S&P 500 index, which has returned 10 percent on average over time. Here are the stock market’s 10 best-performing stocks over the last five years.
Cisco Systems, founded in 1984 and a publicly traded company since 1990, was one of the premier tech stocks of the dot-com boom. It suffered along with much of the technology sector when the bubble burst in 2000, but it was no Pets.com. Demand for the routers, switches and modems manufactured by Cisco that form the backbone of the Internet helped the company recover quickly. In 2009, Cisco was added If You Can to the Dow as stocks were finally emerging from the brutal bear market precipitated by the housing crisis and the global financial meltdown. That said, Cisco shares have been something of a disappointment since the current bull market began. True, shares in Cisco are up 266% since the market bottom of March 2009, including dividends, but the Nasdaq-100 index has gained 600% over the same span.
The second-largest semiconductor manufacturer by market value (after Nvidia) and revenue (after Intel), TSM was founded in 1987. A decade later, the world’s original dedicated semiconductor foundry became the first Taiwanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It has since grown into perhaps the single-most important source of chips in the world. Procter & Gamble (PG) is another consumer products best solar stocks 2021 stock that created outsized wealth for shareholders over the past three decades – even as tech stocks got all the glory. But what really changed the company’s fortunes was its often painful transition away from traditional software licensing to providing cloud-based services. It took a while for the market to buy into Oracle’s transformation story, but once it did, the stock returned to its market-beating ways.
