Pharma Stocks Buck the Market Trend

As promised, I will reveal the top-performing Nasdaq 100 stock of 2008--barring some 11th-hour stock-moving event in the last few days of the year.

The Nasdaq is down 42 percent this year. Its worst year ever. The Nasdaq biotech index has held up significantly better, but it still fell 16 percent.

And then there's Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX). As of Friday's close it was up 27 percent in 2008. The stock's been on a roller-coaster as investor sentiment swings back and forth over the perceived prospects for VRTX's drug for hepatitis C. So, I was surprised when I read our stock statistician's email last Friday evening pointing out that VRTX's 27 percent rise makes it the best performing stock in the Nasdaq 100 this year.

Vertex is in a race with Schering-Plough (SGP) to bring a good new drug for hep C to market. Investors could get another update on Vertex's progress when it presents at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in a few weeks.

As always, we'll be at the San Francisco event with a full lineup of live interviews with C-suite execs, including Vertex's Joshua Boger. I guess he'll get to take a victory lap for VRTX's whopping 70 percent outperformance of the Nasdaq this year.

Here at CNBC we've got a team of folks who compile market stats and regularly send them out via blast emails. They slice and dice the stuff every which way, and while it's very helpful and insightful for a lot of our staffers, I confess I usually instantly delete the messages since much of it doesn't pertain to my beat.

But for some reason last Friday evening — maybe because I was bored on the train ride home and I don't pass the time playing "Brickbreaker" — I opened and paged down one of the stock-stat emails.

It came as no surprise that General Motors (GM) is the December dog of the Dow — down more than 30 percent so far this month.

But I was definitely caught off guard when I saw that Merck (Merck!) is the best performing Dow component in December, with less than three trading days left. MRK shares (MRK) are up eight-and-a-half percent.

Could the drugmaker's annual analyst meeting earlier this month have been a catalyst? Or did investors simply decide the stock's cheap with a high dividend yield?