Problems at 100 Long-Term Underperformers
The steadiest alpha often hides in plain sight: businesses that have trailed the market for decades and show no sign of catching up.
They are the melting ice cubes, the Big Lots, Blockbusters, and Borders. You don’t get celebrity status for calling their failure when the trend is obvious, but you can very much make money doing so.
Today’s special report is a hand‑picked roster of 100 value traps, melting ice cubes, and companies saddled with misaligned leadership incentives. Together they represent hundreds of billions in market capitalization, yet most remain ignored by short activists, FinTwit, and mainstream research.
To make this comprehensive list, The Bear Cave manually went through each long-term underperformer in the S&P 1500 over the last decade, used ChatGPT o3 to find companies with the worst management cultures in the Russell 2000, reached out to sector experts, and went through our five-year archive of media reporting on self-dealing management teams.
Today’s list of 100 long-term underperformers is the perfect hunting ground for short ideas in any market condition. Every company on this list has underperformed the market since inception and we provide our reasoning why we believe the underperformance will continue onward.
Let’s dig in.