Retailers and miners look set to feature prominently among the best performers in the end of year review of the stock market's leaders and laggards.

Leaving aside Atia Group, the Israeli real estate development firm with interests in Croatia and the US that took over shell company Kidron Industrial Holdings, the best performer of the year so far is car dealer Pendragon, up 1,248% since the beginning of the year.

The company started the year as a penny stock but after agreeing a new three-year £530m secured financing package with its lenders the shares moved up several gears as the government's 'cash for bangers' programme gave the car market a much needed lift.

Sector peer Inchcape, up 357% on the year, also put in a turbo-charged performance, making the 153% gain achieved by rival car dealer look sluggish in comparison.

Clinton Cards pulled off a neat trick during the year, shunting its loss-making greeting cards chain Birthdays into administration in May and then cherry picking 196 Birthdays stores in a deal with the administrator.

The shares rose 893% on the year, and one can only hope that some of those Birthdays employees who lost their jobs in the sale-and-buyback move had a pile of Clinton Cards shares to cushion the blow.

Elsewhere on the High Street it was a lively year for sportswear retailers, with JJB Sports and Sports Direct under investigation from the Serious Fraud Office for alleged price fixing.

JD Sports Fashion is widely regarded as the class act of the sector, and it powered forward, raising first half profits and like for like sales in the 26 weeks to 1 August.

This helped propel the shares 180% higher on the year but continuing the theme of recovery stocks, this performance was overshadowed by JJB Sports which soared 633% after staving off possible collapse with a £100m cash call.

Other top performing retail stocks included Topps Tiles (+289%), which today announced it is cutting loose its loss-making Dutch subsidiary, and chain store Debenhams (+239%), which continued its renaissance as it shifts its focus to own brand clothes.

Among FTSE 100 constituents, the miners were the big gainers as metals prices recovered strongly on expectations that the Chinese economy will get back on track next year.

Kazakhmys (+438%) and Vedanta (+289%) bounced back hardest, while among FTSE 250 miners Ferrexpo (+533%) caught the eye.

Moving over to the laggards, the dubious honour of the wooden spoon looks set to go to sub-prime lender Cattles, which saw its shares slump from 18p at the beginning of the year to 1p in December.

The company, which has had to swallow enormous write-downs on the value of its loan book, had a board room clear-out, sacking seven senior executives in July, six of whom had been suspended since March when the company uncovered a "breakdown" in internal controls.

Fed up shareholders have voted for the company to be wound up, against the wishes of the directors, who are trying to breathe life back into the company after securing a standstill agreement with its key financial creditors in November.

Newspaper distributor Dawson Holdings' fall from grace was the result of a corporate mugging, as rivals Smiths News and John Menzies nabbed many of its distribution agreements.

Dawson bowed to the inevitable and withdrew from the newspaper distribution business, leaving its two rivals to pick over the bones of its Surridge Dawson subsidiary, which Dawson put into administration.

Dawson shares lost 91% on the year.

A debt burden crushed engineering consultancy White Young Green. The shares shed 90% of their end-2008 value after the company warned that any refinancing would be likely to substantially dilute the holdings of shareholders.

Shopfitter Styles & Wood hit the skids after it called off a sale of the company and opted, instead, for a refinancing. The shares fell 78% in 2009.

Among blue-chip stocks there are no prizes for guessing that part-nationalised lender Royal Bank of Scotland was the worst performer, losing 37% of its value.

The shares started the year at 49.4p (adjusted for the company's monster rights issue), fell as low as 10.3p at one point, before recovering to just under 30p in the week before Christmas.

The roller coaster ride of the share price suggests that while there are undoubtedly a lot of very, very angry shareholders nursing huge losses, others on the share register could be sitting on the sort of huge gains normally only enjoyed by bankers at bonus time.

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