Ben Carlson

speaker

1,555 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 11 Jun

Ben Carlson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · Ben Carlson on Why It’s Better to Avoid a Strikeout Than to Swing for a Home run · 19 Apr 2026 podcast

He's looking at like 100 years of data.

And he says basically 60% or so of the companies fail to keep up with T-bills or cash, right, over the very long term.

The other, you know, 30% and change kind of more or less keep up with that, maybe a little better.

And then something like 4% of all stocks are account for all the gains.

So it's the big ones, you know, Apple and Exxon and Amazon and Google and Nvidia.

And these huge stocks from a market cap perspective have given investors all their gains over the past hundred years or whatever.

And his point is, you know, there's a lot of different ways to look at it.

The one way to look at it is if you own just one of these winners, you're probably set.

Like all of your other losers are, you can offset all of them.

So if you're an individual stock picker, as long as you have

Again, that intestinal fortitude to stick with a long-term winner like that, that can pay off a lot of bets.

And it's almost like a VC portfolio, a power law.

If you've owned Apple for about 20 years, it didn't matter how bad you did in your other portfolio picks.

That one offset all of the losers.

I think that back to the diversification piece, casting a wide enough net,

helps too that you wanna make sure that you are able to get some of these winners, right?

And have them in your portfolio in some way.

And so that's the diversification piece is if you happen to miss out on a lot of these big winners, it's gonna be tough.

And the other thing is, obviously, he's looking at 100 years of data.

So a lot of these companies that ended up going under and not making it, you could have gotten fantastic returns for one, two, three, five, seven years before these companies petered out, right?

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