Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/business/stocks-investing-markets.html
WorldCom, Lucent Technologies, Wachovia and Rivian Automotive: These companies are members of a dubious group, the worst stock market investments of the last century.
That lowly status is documented in a long-running study that has gotten far more attention for its depiction of the century’s best stocks. But it suggests that the most dangerous times for investors are when the market is high — and we may be in such a time right now.
The study, by Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University, shows that most of the biggest losers since 1926 were tech companies.
They included stocks that boomed during the dot-com era and in the halcyon days just before the financial crisis that began in 2007 — and many crashed when those boom cycles ended. WorldCom and Lucent Technologies were dot-com telecommunications giants. There were banks, too: Wachovia was on the verge of collapse when it was acquired by a competitor, Wells Fargo, in 2008.
Two of the worst companies began trading on U.S. public markets only in this decade.
Both are electric car firms whose share prices at their initial public offerings were remarkably high. Their exorbitant prices reflected investor enthusiasm at the time for the budding industry, but set up shareholders for steep losses. One was VinFast Auto, a Vietnamese company that trades on the Nasdaq. The other was Rivian, which generated shareholder losses of $85.8 billion from its I.P.O. in November 2021 through this past December, according to Professor Bessembinder’s calculations.
Rivian jumped out at me as particularly noteworthy because its chief executive, Robert J. Scaringe, was paid more than $402 million in 2025, as I reported last month. That put him fifth in a ranking of the most highly compensated chief executives at publicly traded companies in the United States. Rivian may well have a great future, but the company is still unprofitable, and long-term shareholders have taken a pounding.
I’ve mentioned just a few of the firms with poor stock market performance. The companies at the bottom of the heap all had different characteristics. What they had in common was that their bad share performance occurred after their stocks were hot. First, they attracted enormous amounts of investor cash. Then the value of the shares evaporated.
WorldCom, Lucent Technologies, Wachovia and Rivian Automotive: These companies are members of a dubious group, the worst stock market investments of the last century.
That lowly status is documented in a long-running study that has gotten far more attention for its depiction of the century’s best stocks. But it suggests that the most dangerous times for investors are when the market is high — and we may be in such a time right now.
The study, by Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University, shows that most of the biggest losers since 1926 were tech companies.
They included stocks that boomed during the dot-com era and in the halcyon days just before the financial crisis that began in 2007 — and many crashed when those boom cycles ended. WorldCom and Lucent Technologies were dot-com telecommunications giants. There were banks, too: Wachovia was on the verge of collapse when it was acquired by a competitor, Wells Fargo, in 2008.
Two of the worst companies began trading on U.S. public markets only in this decade.
Both are electric car firms whose share prices at their initial public offerings were remarkably high. Their exorbitant prices reflected investor enthusiasm at the time for the budding industry, but set up shareholders for steep losses. One was VinFast Auto, a Vietnamese company that trades on the Nasdaq. The other was Rivian, which generated shareholder losses of $85.8 billion from its I.P.O. in November 2021 through this past December, according to Professor Bessembinder’s calculations.
Rivian jumped out at me as particularly noteworthy because its chief executive, Robert J. Scaringe, was paid more than $402 million in 2025, as I reported last month. That put him fifth in a ranking of the most highly compensated chief executives at publicly traded companies in the United States. Rivian may well have a great future, but the company is still unprofitable, and long-term shareholders have taken a pounding.
I’ve mentioned just a few of the firms with poor stock market performance. The companies at the bottom of the heap all had different characteristics. What they had in common was that their bad share performance occurred after their stocks were hot. First, they attracted enormous amounts of investor cash. Then the value of the shares evaporated.