Ben Carlson

And he's a professor at the University of Arizona State.

And he talks about the fact that over the long haul, the concentration of the U.S.

stock market is probably more than you think.

His definition of long term is even longer than mine probably.

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?