The index and the median stock are not the same thing

Headlines report the index. But an index is weighted towards its largest companies, and it regularly swaps out companies that shrink for ones that grew. The typical stock can tell a different story.

Across the 1,626 NSE stocks with at least five years of prices, the median compound growth rate over the last five years was +6.1% a year. 543 stocks, 33.4%, were lower than five years earlier. The rest of the spread is just as wide:

A few very large gains pull an average up, which is why the median, the stock in the middle, is the fairer picture of "typical". An index can rise strongly while a large share of individual stocks fall, because its biggest members carry the most weight.

Who is still here?

In the first week of this record (January 2021), 2,052 symbols traded on NSE. Of those, 1,650 still trade under the same symbol today. At least 167 of the rest changed symbol (renamed or merged), so they are not all gone. Others were delisted, merged into other companies or suspended. Any study that only looks at companies listed today quietly leaves out the ones that disappeared, which makes the past look better than it was. This is called survivorship bias.

What this record can't tell you

These are price changes only (no dividends), for stocks with five years of prices, as of one date. Five years is one window; a different window gives different numbers. Nothing here says which stocks will rise or fall.

See the spread for yourself in the screener (sort by 5-year CAGR), or read thinking traps in Learn.