what does outperform mean 
in financial news media outperform is commonly used as a rating given by analysts who publicly research and recommend securities if they change their rating on a particular security to outperform from market perform or even underperform then something has changed in their analyses that makes them believe the security will produce higher returns for the foreseeable future than the major market indexes another common usage of this term is as a description of how the returns of one investment compare to another between two investment choices the one with better returns is said to outperform the other this is most commonly applied to a comparison between one investment and the market in general investment professionals almost always compare investment returns with a benchmark index such as the s p 500 index so the term is often used in reference to whether a particular investment has outperformed the s p 500 