How many publicly-traded healthcare companies beat the market?

Answer as of March 28, 2023. I compared the year over year results the 1241 publicly traded companies in the healthcare sector to the VTI (Vanguard Total Market Index fund) over the past week, year, 3 years, and 5 years:

This data certainly has Survivorship bias. Many of the companies don’t have data that goes back 5 years (in fact the median is just under 6 years, and the youngest company is just a couple of weeks old), in that case I only considered weeks where I had year over year data available.

Code for how I found this here: https://github.com/matthewdrees/the-dude-compounds

I got the list of publicly-traded healthcare stocks from the NASDAQ Stock Screener: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/screener

For stock prices I used the free weekly-adjusted company data from Alpha Vantage. For year over year calculations I used the weekly “adjusted close”: https://www.alphavantage.co/documentation/