Outperform

Wall Street stock analysts are employed and deployed by brokers to put out investment opinions to the public. They publish their findings for anyone to see.

"How good can they really be? If they were actually good at picking stocks, wouldn't they just do that on their own and not publish their thoughts for any yutz to read?"

So yeah, that's a good question. We'll leave it there. The analyst community has a range of ratings on stocks and bonds. Sell, Buy. Or Strong Sell, Strong Buy. For some, they want to take market wrinkles out of the equation, so everything is relative to how well the market does (and for most on Wall Street, "market" means the S&P 500; in Silicon Valley, "market" is usually NASDAQ).

"Outperform" is another rating. It just means that, if a given stock is rated that way, the analyst believes that, in the next n quarters, the stock will appreciate in value better than the market.