2021 reducing creeping totalitarianism may be most important task of all. will be back here on "wsj at large." thank you for joining us. have a happy and blessed new year. >> "barron's roundtable" sponsored by invesco qq. ♪ jack: welcome to a special year-end edition of "barron's roundtable" where we will look past the headlines and focus on the year ahead. i'm jack otter. coming up we begin the new year with a new president and long-awaited covid vaccine. where do markets go next. ian bremer will be here. later we look at some of the investment ideas in "20/20". which panned out and which flamed out. we're looking at the best worst performers of the next year and to expect in 2021. it is stars and stingers list.

ben levinson, carl english, jack howe. happy new year's guys, we made it through 2020. >> happy new year to to you. jack: jack, you got the 2020 haircut, looking relaxed. betting on better year to come? >> dog and i got both haircuts the same day. we each have our own clippers, jack. yes, definitely will abettor year in 2021. the bar is low. the end of the pandemic is in sight with the vaccines. made it through a bitter election. through forest fires and murder hornets. if we get out of january and it doesn't start raining burning diapers i think we'll say we're off to a strong start. jack: i think after the burning diapers comment it is time to move back to the stock market. look, without amazon my kids would not have had a crate christmas. jack you're looking at the stock. the stockholders are happy too, 70% it was up this year?

>> a absolutely. you can call it a pandemic stock. revenues grew 35%ish in 2020 but it is not just a pandemic stock because when you look in the years to come, revenue growth is projected at 15 to 18% a year. that is very fast for a company this large. free cash flow is exploding upwards. i think amazon has a good shot of catching up to apple on free cash flow within the next three years. so i think the stock has more upside. jack: you know, scott galloway compares it to darth vader. the death grip, it didn't even have to touch another business. it threatens to go in there and the other business starts choking. carl, you're looking at the ipo market. it was an incredible year of ipos in 2020. snowflake, airbnb, lemonade, the list goes on and on. will this keep rolling into 2021? >> looking into 2021 we have a

number of companies looking to go public, bumble, instacart, next door. you have to tell me with the with the roblox. i don't play videogames. there were trading on first day of ipos rivaling during the dot-com here a, however, during the dot-com era number of companies tripled or more on the first day. next year looks to be robust. ipoetf doubled this year. as we recover, as the economy recovers investors may start putting money in beaten down sectors. i don't know that the ipo etf will have the same type of year. i think we'll see robust ipo activity. jack: certainly makes sense. we have to go to ben for the mack daddy of all stock market stars in 2020. that would be tesla. 650% more give or take up this

year. do they keep on zooming ahead in 2021. >> tesla fans will always hate me for saying this, jack. 2021 will be a rough year with the stock. not that there is anything wrong with the company. tesla can deliver 800,000 cars according to forecast but it gained 670% in "20/20". it is trading 12 times sales. it is controlling a tiny shriller of the overall market. stocks don't go up that much and not pay the piper. jack: more fun to talk about the winners we'll zip through the stinkers. energy was rough in "20/20". got worse in "20/20". we talk about chevron the class of the oil patch t was only down 30%. what do you see ahead for that company? to what ben was saying about tesla, people are, this is a profound change coming in cars we'll knot all be driving

electric cars by 2030. we'll need oil a long time to come. we had a collapse in demand in 2020. it will recover in 2021 as the economy opens. mainly producers, opec cut production last year. they stuck to what they said they were going to do. though really cut production. we will have a better supply demand balance. chevron put returns ahead of production. you get a 6% dividend. looks like they will generate plenty of free cash flow in 2021 to cover the dividend. jack: short time to go through two more stocks. carlton, financial sector had it rough. wells fargo had it rougher in 2020. >> when you look at recovery in bank stocks, banks are down roughly 15% in the year. wells fargo down 20% in 2020. for 2021 banks looking to recover. they were operating under a asset cap. they were hoping that would be lifted soon. there is the issue of their ability to cut costs and do buybacks that should be a

catalyst for the stock. jack: ben, boeing has similarities to wells fargo. obviously we stopped flying. aerospace was not a good industry in 2020. boeing had its own serious problems. >> had the 737 max whichs with grounded after crashes. changed software surrounding the plane. covid arrived. customers weren't buying planes anymore. they weren't flying. so its stock fell 30%. the max is cleared to fly again. the vaccines are successful means more flyers and the airlines will have to upgrade the planes to try to boost their margins and that will help things too. this should be a much better year for boeing. jack: if they had to have a tough time maybe this was a good year to have a breather. coming up, why our next guest says we're heading for a global depression, but that isn't as bad as it soundses. global forecaster ian bremer joins us. that is next.

♪. jack: as the u.s. transitions to a biden administration and out of the covid-19 crisis, one what are the big issues facing markets in 2021 and beyond? unking me eurasian group president ian bremer. thank you for coming on the show. >> my pleasure. jack: you convened a global summit what you called the g zero world. can you define the term, what it means for the market? >> it is not a g7 or a g20, all the summittry of the world's largest countries and economies. inabsence of global leadership. as we've seen everyone's respondinging to the vaccine buo one is coordinating. that means less efficiency and more conflict. jack: what does that mean for

the stock market, bond market, global markets? >> go long volatility. we know that. that means more uncertainty. the united states as the world's largest economy is greater focus of safety because when you have an enormous amount of uncertainty people are more focused on making sure their money isn't going away as opposed to return. jack: preservation of capital. on that score you recently told leslie norton at barron's, my colleague, you're forecasting a depression. can you explain why that is? >> depressions, they're larger in scale than recessions. the largest recession in history was the great recession in 2008. this disruption is greater. it's global. this disruption is global but most importantly life does not return to the status quo ante after you go through and when you think about the immense disruption of jobs, the

extraordinary focus on new technologies and innovation, as a consequence closings down of the brick-and-mortar, change on climate as opposed to fossil fuels, all those things are kind of step change that makes life after coronavirus very different than life before. jack: so just to be clear here, was that the depression or you see something worse in our near future? >> no. that is the depression we're talking about. the fact people don't like using the term because it scares them. they shouldn't. of course there is so much more wealth today in the world and in the united states than there was when the great depression hit a century ago. so the absolute wealth of the average human being and ability to get through this is a hell of a lot greater than it was when we were in a different stage of development. jack: gotcha. that makes sense.

pivot to china which you talk a lot about, you predicted a technological cold war, maybe we're in it, how does that look different if at all in a biden administration? >> it is more coordinated with other countries. you saw from the europeans they actually want to work with the united states to more effectively coordinate tech policy visa china. global says over the past 50 years has been all about basically global supply chains and moving labor to china, the world's largest factory and repository of inexpensive labor. labor has gotten a lot more expensive. it doesn't matter as much for capital. increasingly growth is driven by data. in data, unlike with labor, the united states and american allies are not looking to work with the chinese who are actually at cross-purposes with each other. that is an unwind of a big piece of globalization at least, more fragmented global data market.

everything with a chip in. once again, less efficiency in what you would like to see otherwise from a global market. whenever politics inserts in the marketplace like this, it usually means police efficiency. jack: sure, that makes sense, i still got to ask you is there a policy direction would make more sense than a different policy if government has to be in there? >> well you certainly want the united states and europe and china to continue to work together economically. because there is so much interdependence. when we go to walmart, you buy a lot of goods made in china because they're less expensive. if you were to suddenly tariff all those goods the american taxpayer will feel it, right? you go to american university, there are a lot of students coming over paying full freight tuition from china. you cut them off, who will pay for the colleges? they will fall apart. there are a lot of things like that when you're dealing with what will soon be the largest economy in the world, but it is not aligned with american

values. one thing i have to say, all the people in the biden administration working on foreign policy and national security, when they were in policy 10, 20 years ago, they all thought that as china got wealthier china would become more aligned with the u.s. politically and economically. that's just not happened. that means we'll have to change the way we think about engaging with the chinese. jack: that's a good point. i want to pivot to one more question at your summit. you also had a lot of discussion of trust. there certainly seems to be a truth deficit in this nation, whether it is people who don't believe they have covid when they're dying from it, the election, people don't believe joe biden won. what are the implications of that? is that something markets should be worried about? >> absolutely the united states today is most economically and politically divided country in all the industrialized democracies. the reason that impacts markets,

most americans will not support a policy of free trade or being the world's policemen and sending troops all over the world or even promoting democracy to other countries because if they don't believe their leaders are working for them, then they're not going to support the kind of policies that the establishment, boeing democrat and republican have been putting for war over the past decade t makes it so much harder for markets to benefits from goods and services, people, data, moving freely all over the world. if you're living in the united states the american dream doesn't apply to you, you don't care as much for the top 10. jack: we have work to do in 2021. ian bremer. thank you very much. >> sure. jack: each week we give you our investor ideas for your portfolio. we'll see how we did. our favorite and not so favorite picks from the last year. that is next. ♪.

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♪. jack: every week the panel offers investment ideas for you to consider. how did we do? time to see which ones we're glad we picked in 2020 and which ones we wish we really hadn't. carl, i was in cabela's christmas shopping, saw yeti tumblers, fore$30. i better buy the stock than the product. you recommended that in may. it was a good call. >> the stock more than doubled again. it was one of those stay at home and type of travel people were doing. one-day camping trips or hiking trips i should say. that type of outdoor activity and you know, yeti's recent trading prices you could get two of their tumblers for what the stock was recently trading at.

jack: if you could have one back, your wish i hadn't stock might be netflix. that was october you made that call. >> yes. so with netflix i wish i hadn't made it so late. it is still a very good company. obviously had a huge runup until october. it hasn't really done much since. netflix is facing a ton of competition from disney plus and other streaming services. people will watch it. i loved "the crown" and "queen's gambit." i doubt they have the type of 2020 they had in 2021. jack: meanwhile ben made a very contrarian call, parent company of olive barden, longhorn steakhouse, seemed like a lousy investment in the summer when no one was going to restaurants, but the stock is up 60%. >> that's right, jack. the stock is darden. when i picked them in june you could see people coming back to life a little bit with the coronavirus and darden had put a lot of money in technology. it was easy to do delivery or

curbside pickup. investors looked out into the future they will come through this just fine. they are in better shape than small independent restaurants. it easily outpaced the s&p 500. jack: on the other hand in middle of a pandemic who wouldn't love a biotech company. you picked regeneron. the stock hadn't done much. >> it wasn't great. it had come a long way at that point when i picked it in may. i thought it was set to move even higher. the problem it was working on statement for covid and vaccines came before the treatment. they had been approved and regeneron's treatment has not. so the stock dropped 7% since i picked it. that is bad enough but the s&p has gone up 20% during the same time which really makes it an awful call. jack: don't beat yourself up. jack, the only tech stock on our list was your broadcom call. that turned out to be a real good one. >> not quite as good as carlton's pick or ben's pick.

i like this stock. they didn't do anything fancy. didn't convert balance sheet to bitcoin or deliver cannabis by drone. it is cheap. 16 times cash flow. dividend 3%. jack: dude, cannabis by drone. that should abyss for us next year. the melting ice cub on your use was department stores t was ugly for them before the pandemic. it pot uglier naturally you said you avoid them. they rallied. is this a dead-cat bounce? >> i thought it would be disappointing christmas season for the companies we got the vaccine news. they shot higher. i feel like i've been beat up by a pack of angry macy's san tas. i don't love the stocks but they have had a remarkable bounce. jack: people are going back to the malls. slowly surely.

that is good news for the economy. up next our financial resolutions for the year. ♪ limu emu and doug. and if we win, we get to tell you how liberty mutual customizes car insurance so you only pay for what you need. isn't that what you just did? service! ♪ stand back, i'm gonna show ya ♪ ♪ how doug and limu roll, ya ♪ ♪ you know you got to live it ♪ ♪ if you wanna wi... [ music stops ] time out! only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪

♪. jack: let's start the new year with financial resolutions for 2021. nothing crazy. these are all achievable. what is the financial resolution not just as we start the new year. according to farmer's almanac, this is the start of a new decade. >> there will not be anymore market timing for me for a while. i tried my hand in that in 2020. it did not go well. the pandemic looks likes it is getting worse, market is expensive and maybe people will

disagree with the outcome. we had all those things. market got expensive. the best november in decades. i do the thing bowling with bumpers, i only go within certain range. if i'm supposed to be 70% stock allocation, go up5 or down to 55. i don't get crazy. that helps me not sell too much out of stocks but it cost me a little bit in my returns in the fall. jack: that is a great point. even if you do make a mistake, the mistake is not as painful had you gone all-in. carlton, you're channeling an uner accountant. what do you have for financial resolutions? >> this is year where you want to get a early start on taxes. for a lot of people changed for them, either in this past year. wanted to make sure that is reflected in the tax returns. home office deductions. retirement withdrawal, there are pandemic related rule changes that you might want to check on early withdrawals.

also, if you had a major retirement contribution, and you're able to, make sure you do that. jack: that is good advice. that is very important. maybe people will get their accountant, their information by april 13th instead of the 14th? ben, you are reminding people after cardinal rule to not let your emotions get in the way of your investment ideas? >> it is really about politics. let's stop talking about who the, what the winner of the election will mean for the stock market. it really doesn't matter. donald trump won in 2016. the stock market went up. joe biden won in 2020, at least looks that way, stock market went up. there are other things going on here that matter. vote your values, vote your checkbook, vote whatever you want but don't vote for anybody because you think the market will go up or down because they're in office. jack: that is great advice. if you hated obama, you had a painful few years in that bull market. if you didn't like trump same thing happened to you.

jack, carlton, ben, those are great ideas. thank you, welcome to 2021. to read more, check out this week's of barron's.com. (announcer) the following is a sponsored program for prostagenix, furnished by prostatereport.com. (upbeat music) ♪ hi, this is larry king. over 30 million men in america have prostrate problems. i know, i was one of them. and all these natural prostate supplements like the ones i have here in front of me are everywhere. drugstores, health food stores, on the internet, and all over tv, selling millions of bottles every year.