100 Stocks You Should Have Invested In 5 Years Ago (2024)

100 Stocks You Should Have Invested In 5 Years Ago (1)

If you know even a little bit about finance and investing, then you probably know that the stock market offers the most attractive returns for the average retail investor. The S&P 500, the index most commonly used as a proxy for the total U.S. stock market, delivered an average annual return of 14.68% over the last five years. That means $10,000 invested at the start of the period would be worth roughly $19,800 now, almost doubling your money. Not bad!

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This type of investing — buying a widely diversified group of stocks to replicate an index — is called passive investing. It has a lot of advantages. It’s very easy to do, as there are now dozens of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) replicating multiple stock indices. It’s low risk, because the stock has delivered very consistent returns over the decades. It’s also low cost, meaning less of your returns get eaten away by management fees and expenses.

One of the downsides of passive investing is that when you “own the market” you are investing in both the winners and the losers, and it turns out that the market has a lot of losers. For example, a paper authored by finance Prof. Hendrik Bessembinder for the Journal of Financial Economics found that the majority of large-cap stocks failed to outperform their index. Even more striking was the finding that the entire net gain over the life of the total stock market since 1926 was created by just the top-performing 4% of companies.

Advocates of passive investing would point to this as proof of how hard it is to pick the winners — and they’re not wrong. Successful active investing isn’t easy, and even most professionals can’t beat the market over the long haul. Warren Buffett’s famous million-dollar bet with hedge fund manager Ted Seides proved that, when Buffett’s single index fund massively outperformed Seides’ handpicked group of hedge funds over a 10-year period.

Active investing remains popular, however, because for those who are good enough or lucky enough to pick one of the few winners, the rewards can be spectacular. For example, if you invested $10,000 in semiconductor company Nvidia’s stock five years ago, you would be sitting on over $200,000 today. These sorts of eye-popping returns are hard to resist. Here are 100 winners that just might have made you rich if you had bought them five years ago.

Note: The total return accounts for the impact of events like dividends and stock splits, and may be more or less than the percentage change in stock price over five years.

100 Stocks You Should Have Invested In 5 Years Ago (2)

Celsius Holdings (CELH)

Share price in 2019: $1.15
Share price in 2024: $81.62
Total 5-year return: 6,778%

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