Playing it safe usually dooms investors to abysmal returns. But now, the safest stocks have become the most lucrative.
It’s a bit of a head-scratcher on Wall Street: Low pain and big gain. The 10 stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 with the lowest relative volatility the past five years, including mostly utilities like AGL Resources (GAS), Consolidated Edison (ED) andSouthern (SO), have rocketed an average 23% this year, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
