It’s the age-old question: Is it better to bottom-fish among the losers or ride the winners? An analysis of individual stock returns in the S&P 500 Index between 2010 and 2011 shows that last year, neither course was necessarily the best bet.

The index finished 2011 with a return that was respectable under difficult circumstances: +2.11%. But where did these returns come from? Looking back to 2010, the year’s top 100 stocks in the S&P 500 finished with an average return (not market-cap weighted) of -2.09% in 2011. 2010’s bottom 100 stocks also lagged 2010’s winners in 2011, with an average return of -5.17%.

Narrowing it down even further, the top 25 stocks of 2010 were even further behind in 2011, returning -5.96% on average (more than eight percentage points behind the market) while the bottom 25 of 2010 were hammered for a loss of 8.43%.

The answer, then, confirms what mutual funds’ legal disclaimers have been telling us for years: Past performance is indeed no guarantee of future results. Still, investors would have been slightly better off riding the winners from 2010 into 2011, rather than looking for opportunities in the “dogs.”

As might be expected, the top and bottom 100 of 2010 provided more than their share of big movers last year. A look at the top 100 shows that:

• 10 of 2010’s top 100 stocks remained in the top 100 in 2011.
• 26 of 2010’s top 100 stocks fell into the bottom 100 in 2011.

In other words, while the average returns of the top 100 stocks were better overall, investors would have had a much larger chance of picking a loser out of this group than a winner. Among 2010’s worst performers:

• 17 of 2010’s bottom 100 stocks rose to the top 100 in 2011.
• 30 of 2010’s bottom 100 remained in the bottom 100 in 2011.

Here, we see that an investor who attempted to look for bargains in the bottom 100 had a better chance of picking a big winner, but also a 30% chance of owning one of 2011’s losers — no small consideration, since the stocks in this bottom quintile all finished with losses of 18.7% or more.

In the end, the one statement that can be made with certainty regarding the winners and losers of 2010 is that they served as an above-average source of beta for traders in 2011.

With this as the background, here is the list of top winners and losers in the index in 2011: