Barron’s Trader Stock Picks Had a Better Year Than the Market. What Worked—and What Didn’t.

It was a good year for the Trader column—and we’re not going to let a little thing like a small decline get in the way of our saying it.

In any other year, we might have called our picks lackluster or even mediocre, given that the stocks—chosen by various Barron’s staffers—dropped 0.8% from the trading day before the pick through the end of the year. But relative to the stock market, we knocked it out of the park. The


S&P 500


dropped 5.8% over the same period as our picks, which means our picks outpaced the index by five percentage points.