A Wall Street Journal blog post by Jason Zweig profiles “superstocks” and suggests they provide a “reason why, for most people, index funds make superior sense.” Zweig notes that 44 U.S. stocks have generated cumulative returns of 10,000% or more over the last 30 years, and borrows the term “superstock” from William Bernstein of Efficient Frontier Advisors to describe stocks that grew at least twice the rate of the S&P 500. David Salem of Windhorse Capital Management says of the companies, “they have all undergone at least one near-death experience.” Apple, Inc., for example, fell 79.6% between 1992 and 1997, underperforming the S&P 500 by 771%. As David Salem observes, “there are no investment professionals in the world who bought Apple 30 years ago and held it continuously ever since” because of that steep decline. This is why Zweig sees superstocks as a reason for most people to favor index funds: “when companies decline 50% to 80%, index funds won’t sell them . . . if some of those companies bounce back and turn into superstocks, index investors get to go along for the full upswing.”