Best Stock of the Last 30 Years

I often talk about how boring and overlooked stocks can be great investments. At the WSJ, Jason Zweig gives us the name of the best-performing stock of the last 30 years. Not surprisingly, it’s a fairly dull stock.

The best-performing U.S. stock over the past 30 years isn’t a household name like Costco Wholesale Corp. or Johnson & Johnson. It’s Balchem Corp., up 107,099% since the end of 1985, according to FactSet Research Systems.

You’d never heard of Balchem? Me either; stocks don’t come much more obscure than this. Based in Wawayanda, N.Y. (population 7,266), about 70 miles northwest of New York City, Balchem makes flavorings, fumigating gases and nutritional additives for animal feed. Its total stock market value is about $1.7 billion.

Since the end of 1985, Balchem has gained an average of 26.2% annually, compared with 10.3% for the S&P 500 and 15.7% for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

So you would think there would be tons of interest in Balchem. Not at all. Zweig notes that Balchem didn’t attract a single major institutional holder until 1999. That was after it returned an average of 21.3% for the previous decade.

Posted by on January 29th, 2016 at 1:53 pm


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