CALDEIRÃO DE BOLSA

Geoffrey West on his compelling book - Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.

West laid out some wild stats on how difficult it is to sustain a corporation over the long-term:

- 28,853 companies traded on U.S. stock market from 1950-2009. Almost 80% of those companies (22,469) were gone by 2009 (through buyouts, mergers, failure, etc.)

- Fewer than 5% of companies remain over rolling 30 year periods.

- The risk of a company dying does not depend on its age or size as the probability of a 5-year-old company that dies before turning 6 is the same as that of a 50-year-old company reaching age 51.

- The estimated half-life of U.S. publicly traded companies was 10.5, meaning half of all companies that go public in any given year will be gone in 10.5 years.

- There was just a 12 percent survival rate for the firms on the Fortune 500 list in 1955.