Looking at performance from roughly late December 2022 through late December 2023 (well‑approximated by full‑year 2023 returns), the named U.S. defense contractors substantially underperformed the broader U.S. equity market:

• Lockheed Martin (LMT): 2023 total/price return about –4.3%. (financecharts.com)
• Northrop Grumman (NOC): 2023 annual % change about –12.8%. (macrotrends.net)
• RTX Corp (RTX, Raytheon): 2023 return about –16.6%. (slickcharts.com)
• General Dynamics (GD): 2023 return about +7–7.1%. (companiesmarketcap.com)

Over the same year, the S&P 500 total return was about +26.3% in 2023, driven largely by a strong rally in large‑cap U.S. stocks. (slickcharts.com) This means all four contractors lagged the broad market badly over that first year after December 2022, with three of them actually negative while the index gained over 25%.

Since the normalized prediction specified that these defense contractors would "continue to perform well in the stock market for at least the next year" relative to the broader market, and they instead underperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin during that period, the prediction did not come true.