Performance of Barron’s Annual Top 10 Stocks

Each year in December, Barron’s publishes its list of the best 10 stocks for the next year. Do these picks on average beat the market? To investigate, we scrape the web to find these lists for years 2011 through 2024, calculate the associated calendar year total return for each stock and calculate the average return for the 10 stocks for each year. We use SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) as a benchmark for these averages. We source most stock prices from Yahoo!Finance, but also use Historical Stock Price.com for a few stocks no longer tracked by Yahoo!Finance. Using year-end dividend-adjusted stock prices for the specified stocks-years during 2010 through 2024, we find that: (more…)