The 10 best stock pickers that you should have listened to in 2016

Wall Street's sell-side analysts publish piles of recommendations on which stocks to buy, sell, or hold every day.

In retrospect, and for the trader with a shorter time horizon, only a few of those calls were worth listening to in 2016.

TipRanks, a website that tracks and ranks analyst recommendations, compiled a list of stock pickers who had the most success last year.

After scanning hundreds of thousands of recommendations, TipRanks graded them by average return and success rate, which is the ratio of calls that generated positive returns in the following quarter relative to all ratings that were given.

Recommendations were measured for a three-month period from the open date in 2016 or until January 11, if the three months are still ongoing.

Here are the stock pickers, ranked by average return of their calls: