The 10 Best Tech Stocks of All Time

When it comes to lifetime wealth creation, the best tech stocks of all time have punched well above their weight.

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The tech sector has been helping the market hit record highs seemingly every other day. That's no secret. Less well-known is how the best tech stocks of all time have delivered such a disproportionate amount of the market's lifetime wealth creation.

We know of tech's outsize role because a finance professor made a startling discovery about the stock market: 96% of all stocks collectively performed no better than risk-free one-month Treasury bills.

After analyzing the lifetime returns of 25,967 common stocks, Hendrik Bessembinder determined that just 1,092 of those stocks – or about 4% of the total – generated all of the $34.8 trillion in wealth created for shareholders by the stock market over a 90-year period. Even more striking, a mere 50 stocks accounted for almost 40% of that amount.

You can see where this is heading. Of these elite 50 names, fully one in five was a tech stock. In other words, when it comes to lifetime wealth creation, the best tech stocks have punched well above their weight.

Taking a cue from Bessembinder, we screened the S&P 500 for the best tech stocks of all time by looking at annualized total returns since inception. We limited ourselves to names with at least 20 years of annualized return data, but also expanded our universe to include tech-adjacent names that are not actually assigned to the information technology sector.

Before we get to our profiles of the 10 best-performing tech stocks of all time, a word of caution.

Accurately identifying the precious few "home run" stocks amid the many thousands of underachieving names is extremely difficult. Your portfolio is more likely to suffer because you guessed wrong and failed to invest in the top long-term winners, says Bessembinder of Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business.

A better alternative to trying to find a needle in a haystack? To paraphrase Jack Bogle, the Vanguard founder and pioneer of index investing: Just buy the haystack.

"The results reinforce the importance of diversification," Bessembinder says, "and low-cost index funds are an excellent way to diversify broadly."

Without further ado, here are the 10 best tech stocks of all time.

The 10 stocks are listed in reverse order of their all-time annualized total returns (price change plus dividends). Analysts' ratings provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Dan Burrows
Senior Investing Writer, Kiplinger.com

Dan Burrows is Kiplinger's senior investing writer, having joined the publication full time in 2016.

A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, SmartMoney, InvestorPlace, DailyFinance and other tier 1 national publications. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Consumer Reports and his stories have appeared in the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily, among many other outlets. As a senior writer at AOL's DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Once upon a time – before his days as a financial reporter and assistant financial editor at legendary fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily – Dan worked for Spy magazine, scribbled away at Time Inc. and contributed to Maxim magazine back when lad mags were a thing. He's also written for Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievements Awards.

In his current role at Kiplinger, Dan writes about markets and macroeconomics.

Dan holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Disclosure: Dan does not trade individual stocks or securities. He is eternally long the U.S equity market, primarily through tax-advantaged accounts.