Buying stocks everyone admires is a recipe for underperformance — but Apple breaks the rule

Mark Hulbert

Tue, February 17, 2026 at 7:57 AM GMT+9 3 min read

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AAPL

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Apple has been an exception to the stock market’s ”most-admired” trap. - Getty Images

Popularity on Wall Street is a double-edged sword. Remember that as you peruse Fortune’s recently published ranking of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” — the magazine’s annual ranking of corporate reputation. Being at the top of such a ranking can push a company’s stock to quick highs at the cost of long-term performance.

Fortune’s ranking reminds me of those contests in high school where the most popular students ultimately lead sad lives. This impression is more than anecdotal, according to Ralph Keyes’ famous 1977 book, “Is There Life After High School?” He wrote that there often is an inverse relationship between high school popularity and success later in life.

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This inverse pattern was apparent in the stock market over the past year. The 10 most-admired companies in Fortune’s year-ago ranking underperformed a group of companies with the worst reputations.

(Fortune does not publish the companies at the bottom of its ranking. I compiled this underperforming list by focusing on the companies with the worst reputations in an Axios Harris 2024 poll of the companies with the most visible brands.)

The 15 most-admired companies on Fortune’s 2025 list lagged the S&P 500 SPX , on average, while the companies with the worst reputations significantly outperformed the market — as you can see in the chart above.

Not all most-admired companies underperform those with terrible reputations. Apple AAPL, for example, has been at the top of Fortune’s most-admired ranking for 19 straight years; over this period, its stock has far outpaced the U.S. market average.

Apple is more the exception than the rule, according to a study in the Journal of Corporate Finance. Entitled “When is good news bad and vice versa? The Fortune rankings of America’s most admired companies,” the study analyzed Fortune’s “most admired” annual rankings from 1992 through 2012, and found that, on average, an increase in a company’s ranking led to reduced stock performance on average — and vice versa.

Trappings of CEO success

A related study sheds light on why this inverse relationship exists. Entitled “Superstar CEOs,” the researchers focused on CEOs who attain “superstar” status, as measured by, among other criteria, their company’s ranking on “most admired” lists. The stocks of these companies fell 60% on average over the three years after they became superstars.

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At the same time, as their compensation increased, they wrote more books, appeared on the covers of more business magazines, went on television more often and joined the boards of directors of more outside companies.

I suppose one can come up with a narrative for why such outside activities conceivably could benefit a company whose CEO is a “superstar.” But I know of no possible narrative to justify another result in that study: after these CEOs became superstars, their golf scores improved.

We should remember what Warren Buffett, the recently retired CEO of Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A BRK.B, once said about CEOs who got involved in outside activities: “The best CEOs love operating their companies and don’t prefer going to Business Roundtable meetings or playing golf at Augusta National.”

_Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. He can be reached at _

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