WHO would have thought 12 months ago that Chrysler, the much m aligned auto maker, or Winnebago, the once hapless manufacturer of r ecreational vehicles, or Pulte Homes, a builder, would not only w eather one of the worst recessions ever but then soar past a stock m arket that was registering its biggest advance in history?

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Who couldh ave foreseen that Fay's Drug and Home Depot, chain store retailers p eddling rather mundane products, would capture Wall Street's fancy? Coleco, another sleeper, was better known for inflatable swimming pools and plastic tricycles than video games, but as the year was ending it had one of the largest gains of any stock on the New York Stock Exchange. And few investors were expecting that Digital Switch, one of the top performers in over-the-counter trading in , would turn in a repeat performance for Invariably, investors wonder ''where was I when these stocks were discovered?

Obviously, the stock market's explosive surge since mid-August, which resulted in record trading volume and a record Dow Jones industrial average, played the biggest part in pushing the prices of the top performers so far, so fast. But each already had a head of steam going into the rally.

And by year's end, the gains were so large - percent to percent in some cases - that profit-taking trimmed them back to a still-envious percent to percent.

For each of these star performers there was a unique reason or set of reasons why, quarter after quarter, its earnings were well ahead of anyone's expectations. In some of the cases Digital Switch, Telex and Coleco it was a new product. In others Home Depot and Fay's Drug it included undercutting competitors' prices, or Pulte Home and Mountain Medical offering better financing terms. One common thread was the presence of a novel merchandising concept or tool, noted Mr.

Asked what similarities he saw among the top performers, Peter Lynch, portfolio manager of the Magellan Fund, the best performing mutual fund over the past five years, said, ''If I had a crystal ball in early , I would have looked for small consumer-oriented companies where my earnings expectations left room so that if I was right I would be incredibly right.

I also would have bought them only if they were traded at single-digit prices and were not heavily owned by institutions. As for the larger question of where do these stocks go from here, most investment professionals cautioned that last year's winners are usually this year's under-achievers, and in general recommended that only long-term-oriented investors hold onto them.

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Lynch, however, was not so convinced. He noted that many of the best performers this year were relatively small companies. When such a company becomes a top performer one year, he said, it often picks up institutional support.

That support continues to push the price up. In addition, the business cycles that make a company look good usually last more than one year. Below is a look at the year's five best Big Board stocks, the two top American Exchange stocks and the three best over-the-counter stocks as of Dec.

And it was still spiraling upward in the final weeks of December. Chrysler would actually have done so, analysts said, were it not for a five-week strike at its Canadian operation, which was settled Dec. Now, with the likelihood of at least a modest recovery in auto sales in , David Eisenberg, an auto analyst at Sanford C. Lynch of Magellan Fund to buy more than one million shares of Chrysler throughout last year.

As of late December, he had yet to take any profits, convinced that the new car models and a yet-to-be-introduced small van would prove to be winners in the marketplace. Lynch said he believes the market has overreacted to the company's recent labor contract.

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And he tempered his long-term bullishness by conceding that ''the stock has gotten ahead of itself. I think it needs a rest. As a regional drugstore chain operating in such hard-hit areas as Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, Fay's Drug was hardly a leading candidate to be on many investors' buy lists in the midst of a recession.

But it did not take long for word to spread that earnings from sales at its 92 jumbo stores were soaring. Suddenly, Fay's had joined the club of the large national drug chains, such as Revco and Rite-Aid, whose shares had already been driven up. As for the reasons for Fay's success, Mr. Margard cited price competitiveness, a broad array of general merchandise, an effective marketing approach to the elderly and a computerized data processing system for perscriptions and billing.

Describing itself as ''a major manufacturer of recreational and entertainment products for the entire family,'' Coleco became one of the big three in video games in But when Warner's Atari division announced some bad news last month, the downdraft that hit the shares of Warner and Mattel struck Coleco equally hard. The pessimism in Coleco's case was undeserved, said Barbara Isgur, an analyst at Paine Webber Mitchell Hutchins. Colecovision, the company's home video game system introduced last August and sold out of stores this past Christmas, was the state of the art, she maintained.

So were its new game cartridges that have advanced memory and graphic detail and can be used on Atari and Mattel's Intellevision hardware. Isgur remained bullish on Coleco because of its plans to introduce a personal computer module that is compatible with Colecovision hardware in mid Despite the selloff in Coleco's shares, some major shareholders also remained bullish. Besides Coleco's technological leadership, he was impressed by its toy distribution network, its conservative accounting and its expertise in licensing what he considers to be the best software producers of video games.

Remember those lumbering motor homes in which vacationers and retirees discovered America during the early 's? Well, the high cost of gasoline, then the high cost of financing sent Winnebago into a skid a few years ago. To put it back on the road to recovery, its founder, John Hanson, came out of retirement, wielded a sharp ax at excessive costs and spurred the company to introduce new, sleeker, more fuel-efficient generations of motor homes.

From a loss of 55 cents a share in its fiscal year ended Aug. Particularly impressive to William Lester, an analyst at the First Mid-America Corporation in Lincoln, Neb. He said he is looking for an earnings jump to 55 cents a share before extraordinary items for the current fiscal year. Lester recommended the shares only for long-term investors at this stage.

A one-time institutional favorite, Telex nearly went bankrupt in the mid's after the International Business Machines Corporation undercut its prices for tape and disk drives.

Now, Telex is riding an earnings surge and becoming an institutional favorite again, primarily because of its videoscreen computer terminals ''that are as good if not better and 5 percent to 10 percent cheaper than I.

Telex's terminals are compatible with I. But the company isn't so good that it deserves its current price yet.

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Hatton said he originally bought the stock because of the marketing know-how of Mountain Medical's chief executive, Robert Johnson, and because the oxygen concentrator field is a growing one. Cathy McDonald, an analyst at Bear Stearns, pointed out that Mountain Medical has been increasing its market share recently by giving dealers the option of leasing rather than buying equipment outright. The company also introduced a smaller, relatively lightweight model last year.

Despite the recession and high mortgage rates that leveled the sales of other home builders, Pulte Home continued to build more homes than ever and to operate in the black, a feat that did not go unnoticed by Wall Street. A large home builder such as Pulte can undersell its local competition, she noted.

In addition, Pulte increased its market share by offering fixed-rate mortgages that were significantly below going rates. And it increased sales by emphasizing attached homes instead of detached homes. When the first Home Depot store opened in Atlanta in to tap the do-it-yourself home improvement market, it was twice as large as other such centers and it undercut their prices as well.

Since then, the company has opened seven other mammoth stores the average size is 70, square feet and it plans to have up to 16 in operation by the end of Investors obviously like what that expansion did to profits. Home Depot has split its stock three times since the company went public in September Earnings per share should hit 48 cents in the fiscal year ending Jan.

Money managers who have been along for the ride said they were impressed by Home Depot's top executives, who had experience running larger home improvement center chains.

As Bernard Marcus, the company's chief executive, explained, his company's strategy was to have ''the broadest assortment of goods stacked warehouse-style on the selling floor. He added that the company hires and trains sales personnel who can provide helpful advice and conducts clinics to teach customers how to tackle projects.

Gyrating price action is nothing new for the stock of CACI pronounced KHA-kee , an international research analysis and service company that, among other things, develops computer software for the Defense Department's logistics planning and provides demographic studies for corporations. To help reduce volatility and to attract more institutional support, CACI increased its liquidity by splitting the stock 3 for 1 last month. One of the big reasons for the extraordinary earnings surge, he says, is that CACI's international business is now funneled through CACI N.

This was the second year in a row that Digital Switch, a maker of telephone switching devices, has been at the top of the charts in stock performance. It went public as a startup company in but then dropped in price until the present management team took over in early By converting analog sound waves into digital patterns and then back again to analog waves to be heard by the human ear, Digital Switch has enabled the long-distance telephone common carriers, such as MCI, RCA, and Western Union to become more efficient.

They can send more conversations through one transmission path when they are in digital form.

Until Digital Switch came along with its first shipment in early , the private long-distance telephone network market had not had access to digital switching devices, according to James Donald, the company chairman and chief executive officer. Hartke is still recommending purchase. Room for Debate asks whether shorefront homeowners should have to open their land to all comers. Log In Register Now Help Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular.

DealBook Markets Economy Energy Media Technology Personal Tech Entrepreneurship Your Money. THE 10 SUPER STOCKS OF By FRED R. Bleakley writes on finance from New York. COLECO Describing itself as ''a major manufacturer of recreational and entertainment products for the entire family,'' Coleco became one of the big three in video games in WINNEBAGO Remember those lumbering motor homes in which vacationers and retirees discovered America during the early 's? TELEX A one-time institutional favorite, Telex nearly went bankrupt in the mid's after the International Business Machines Corporation undercut its prices for tape and disk drives.

PULTE HOME Despite the recession and high mortgage rates that leveled the sales of other home builders, Pulte Home continued to build more homes than ever and to operate in the black, a feat that did not go unnoticed by Wall Street.

HOME DEPOT When the first Home Depot store opened in Atlanta in to tap the do-it-yourself home improvement market, it was twice as large as other such centers and it undercut their prices as well. CACI Gyrating price action is nothing new for the stock of CACI pronounced KHA-kee , an international research analysis and service company that, among other things, develops computer software for the Defense Department's logistics planning and provides demographic studies for corporations.

DIGITAL SWITCH This was the second year in a row that Digital Switch, a maker of telephone switching devices, has been at the top of the charts in stock performance. Sweep to a Win Over the Heat.