Looking back at this year's best-performing stocks worldwide provides greater insight into the themes favored by investors than the broadest industry-group indexes ever could.

Solar-power equipment makers, which aren't treated as a stand-alone industry by MSCI Inc. or FTSE Group, were market leaders on both sides of the Atlantic as alternative energy became more of a household word.

Coal producers, labeled as a sub-industry by MSCI and a sub-sector by FTSE, were another standout group. A Chinese coal company had the biggest advance in MSCI's Emerging Markets Index for the year.

Fertiliser suppliers produced a bumper crop of gains from the US to the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Their industry is as far down in the index listings as coal.

Yet companies in higher-profile business segments made their mark as well. An iron-ore company was the top performer in the MSCI Pacific Index, a gauge of developed markets. An oil and gas producer headed by Anil Ambani, an Indian billionaire, was a leader in the emerging-market gauge.

Here are the year's biggest winners among companies in MSCI's global benchmarks, along with a couple of honorable mentions.

First Solar Incorporated: Customers flocked to buy the Phoenix- based company's solar modules, based on a relatively low-cost technology, and production expenses fell. The combination sent the company's shares surging more than eightfold, the biggest advance in an MSCI index of US and Canadian stocks.

Q-Cells AG: Germany's biggest solar-cell maker by market value benefited from government incentives in its home country to adopt renewable energy. Demand from France, Italy, Spain and South Korea also climbed. Shares of the Thalheim-based company added 188 percent, the biggest gain in the MSCI Europe Index.

Fortescue Metals Group: The stock led the MSCI Pacific gauge by rising 443 percent as work proceeded on a A$2.7 billion ($2.37 billion) iron-ore mine and port in Western Australia. The company, based in Perth, agreed to supply China's Baosteel Group Corporation and Hangzhou Iron & Steel Group with ore after the mine's opening, scheduled for May.

Inner Mongolia Yitai Coal Company: Dollar-denominated B shares of the company, China's third-largest coal producer, led MSCI's emerging-markets index by climbing 10-fold. Thirteen other coal stocks traded on the mainland more than tripled, on average, as the country's economic boom spurred demand for energy.

Mosaic Company: As farmers bought more fertiliser to increase crop yields, the Plymouth, Minnesota-based company's stock rose 346 percent. The gain, the second-largest in the North America index, merited an honorable mention. The industry's leader in the BRIC countries, Russia's OAO Uralkali, soared 374 percent.

Reliance Natural Resources: Another honourable mention goes to this Mumbai-based unit of Reliance Energy Limited, India's second-largest utility by market value. The stock rose more than six-fold, ranking second within the emerging-markets index. Anil Ambani heads the company and its parent, whose shares tripled.

Psst! Want to buy a computer-chip maker for practically nothing? There's one available: Cypress Semiconductor Incorporated, a San Jose, California-based provider of programmable chips for cars, computers and mobile phones.

Cypress owns a 53 percent stake in SunPower Corporation, the largest US supplier of solar panels, and controls 90 percent of the voting rights at the Sunnyvale, California-based company. SunPower's shares, benefiting from the boom in solar-equipment stocks, have soared 264 percent this year.

The holding was valued at $6.02 billion earlier this week, exceeding the total market capitalisation of Cypress by $70 million. This wasn't some kind of a fluke. Throughout the past month, SunPower's stock has been more valuable than Cypress itself, Bloomberg's data shows.

Cypress owns 44.5 million shares of the solar unit after selling 7.5 million in May. The company is studying "ways in which to allow its stockholders to fully realise the value of its investment," according to its latest quarterly report.

Leucadia National Corporation, added to the Standard & Poor's 500 Index four months ago, has beaten the benchmark and its industry peers since then. This performance hasn't stopped brokerage analysts from shunning the holding company.

Just one firm, Matrix USA LLC, currently has an investment recommendation on the New York-based company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Matrix USA uses a quantitative system to evaluate every company in the Russell 3000 Index, according to its Web site, and has a "strong sell" rating on the stock.

Leucadia is almost unique among S&P 500 companies, which have an average of 18 analyst ratings. Teradata Corporation, a data-storage provider that NCR Corporation spun off on October 1, is the only other index member with a single recommendation. KeyBanc Capital Markets Incorporation calls Teradata a "buy," Bloomberg's data shows.

The breadth of Leucadia's investments might be a reason for the lack of coverage. The company, included in S&P's financial category, has timber, telephone, real-estate, plastics and gaming units. Whatever the reason, it's underfollowed.

(David Wilson is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)