"Morgan Stanley’s Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan recently studied the price behavior of 6,500 stocks. Among other things, they took a closer look at the 20 stocks with the best total shareholder returns over the 40-year period from 1985 to 2024. They also reviewed the performance of the 20 worst performers during the period. (Note: They only considered stocks listed on the NYSE, NASDAQ and NYSE American exchanges that traded during the entire measurement period. They excluded companies worth less than $1 billion at the beginning and $250 million at the end of their maximum drawdowns.)

“The median maximum drawdown was 72% for the best group, and the median maximum drawdown duration, the time from peak to trough, was 2.9 years,” they found. “The median time to return to the prior peak was 4.3 years. The median annualized abnormal returns following the bottom was 8% for the next 5 years and 12% for the next 10 years. This is based on the unrealistic assumption the stock was purchased at the low.”

Mauboussin and Callahan note that Alpha Architect’s Wes Gray considered this thought experiment in a paper titled: “Even God Would Get Fired as an Active Investor.”

“[Gray’s] point is that if you had the (godlike) foresight to build a portfolio of the stocks that would produce the highest TSRs over the next five years, you would have ‘great returns, but gut-wrenching drawdowns,’” they wrote. “In other words, the drawdowns are so large that a client who hired you to be their active manager might fire you.” " tker.co - Best performing stocks experience large max drawdowns