JP Morgan looked at 35 years of stock returns and found something uncomfortable:

4 out of 10 stocks lose money outright. 2 out of 3 underperform the index. And just 7% of names carry nearly the entire market's gains.

This is why index funds are so powerful—not because they're boring, but because they quietly capture the few massive winners while letting all the losers fade into irrelevance.

Most people think picking stocks is about finding good companies. It's actually about not missing the handful that compound into something extraordinary. The index never misses them.