Selecting the Top Stocks by Prior Calendar-Year Return

Summary

A BigQuant forum question asks how to select the ten stocks with the strongest return over the previous calendar year on the first trading day of a new year. The user’s current approximation compares prices about 250 trading days apart, but they want a calendar-year measurement instead. The reply proposes identifying the current year, defining the prior year’s start and end dates, then calculating each stock’s return over that interval and ranking the results.

This approach aligns the measurement period with calendar-year boundaries rather than a fixed number of trading sessions. The exchange does not explain how to define returns when a stock lacks a price on a boundary date, adjust for corporate actions, handle suspensions or new listings, or avoid look-ahead bias when selecting on the first session. The user also asks whether a visual workflow can implement the selection and how code-based data retrieval could feed a visual backtest, but the document contains no answer to those implementation questions.

Key ideas

• Define the measurement interval using the prior calendar year’s start and end dates.
• Rank stocks by return over that interval and retain the top ten.
• A fixed 250-session comparison may not match calendar-year performance.
• The exchange does not address missing prices, corporate actions, or first-session timing details.
• The question about visual screening and backtesting remains unanswered.

Tags

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.