An analysis of 987 listed companies on Bursa Malaysia from April 2021 to April 2026 — what the headline index hides, and which sectors buried the money.
The KLCI tells you Bursa was flat to up over 5 years. The distribution of individual stocks tells a very different story — and the largest bucket is not the mild one.
One in three Bursa stocks didn't just drop — they collapsed. Only 7% escaped with what you'd call a normal market drawdown.
Eleven sectors with five or more listed companies, sorted from worst to best by median drawdown. The gap from top to bottom is 43 percentage points — meaning sector selection mattered far more than stock picking.
n = number of companies. Sectors with fewer than 5 listings excluded.
The top of the leaderboard, with the five worst-performing stocks in each sector named.
Nine of every ten tech stocks lost more than half. Mostly semiconductors, electronics OSAT, and IT services shells.
Don't blame healthcare. Four of the five worst names are rubber glove makers — the COVID bubble popping, not an industry in decline.
Two stories stacked — legacy telecom resellers killed by WhatsApp, plus pay-TV disruption. Astro lost 95%.
The headline "avoid healthcare" is wrong. Strip out the five glove makers and the sector sits mid-pack. The accurate warning is "avoid the post-COVID bubble names" — a single-industry story masquerading as a whole sector.
A more granular look. Industries are GICS sub-sectors — a narrower cut than sectors. All ten worst sit inside three themes: rubber gloves, semiconductors and electronics, and IT services.
n = number of companies. Industries with fewer than 5 listings excluded.
Real peaks, real troughs. All still trading — Bursa's half-sen minimum tick is the only reason these aren't at zero.
Five conclusions drawn from running the numbers at this scale — observations that don't appear in Malaysian retail finance media because nobody else has done the work.
The gap between the worst sector (Technology, −78.7%) and the best (Financial Services, −35.4%) was 43 percentage points. A random pick from financials would have had less than half the drawdown of a random pick from tech. Which sector you chose dominated which stock you chose — the opposite of how most retail investors think about the problem.
Energy had only −60% median drawdown but 81.5% of energy stocks crossed the 50% threshold — the second-highest hit rate after Tech. The pattern: broad-based but capped. Almost everyone got hurt, few got destroyed. Commodity cycles don't go to zero the way shell companies do.
It's the global semiconductor supply chain dressed up in technology labels — Inari, ViTrox, Greatech, Pentamaster, Frontken, MPI. When the chip cycle turned in 2022, the entire cluster fell together. Five of the ten worst industries sit inside this single supply chain. Malaysia is a cyclical hardware play wearing growth-tech clothing.
The KLCI looks fine because it holds 30 names heavily weighted toward Financials and Utilities — exactly the two sectors that survived. The median Bursa stock outside the KLCI had a completely different five years. "The market" and "the stocks" diverged, and the index masked the carnage.
None of the 987 stocks reached zero, but ten sit at RM 0.005 — Bursa's minimum tick size. For practical purposes, these stocks are worthless. The −99.7% floor isn't a feature of Malaysian markets being resilient; it's just the lowest price the exchange allows. Take the rule away and they'd be at zero.