These 50 were the stocks making the biggest gains for their shareholders. I don't know if any of them were quite as hot as our steaming Internet stocks of today, but they did very well. They were expected to be great forever, a sure ride to riches. It turns out a lot of the Nifty Fifty aren't so nifty now, and haven't been very nifty in the last 27 years. Fiduciary Management did a study of 10 of the Nifty Fifty and found that they, in fact, averaged only a 4 percent annual return since 1972.
Annual return is stock price appreciation plus dividends, sometimes called total return.
Xerox Corp. These companies over the last 22 years averaged, as a group, less than half of the annual gain of the average stock price since 1929. Coke had an above-average 12.2 percent annual return, as did McDonald's at 11.6 percent. Disney did about average at 10.2 percent. But look at the rest - IBM's annual return was just 5.3 percent, 3M, 4.4 percent, Xerox, 3.2 percent, and Kodak, 0.3 percent. Kmart's total return was minus 0.3 percent.