Great Call on National City! What's Next?

National City (NYSE: NCC) is a mess. It partied it up along with Citigroup (NYSE: C), Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER), and Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM) over the past few years, and now it's reeling from a really nasty hangover.

National City's poor performance and bleak outlook are reflected in the lousy one-star rating that Motley Fool CAPS players have awarded it. More than 600 players have rated the stock so far, and 280 think that it should be avoided. None, however, has read the stock as well as current Top Fool, SpecBear. Since April of last year, SpecBear has put his thumb down four times on National City and racked up 123 points for his troubles.

SpecBear is one of CAPS' All-Stars -- players with a rating of 80 or greater -- and he has managed a stock-picking accuracy of 82% on his calls while reaping an impressive 7,779 points. National City hasn't been his only great call. Here's a look at a few of his other prescient picks:

Company	Date Picked	Call	Points	CAPS Rating
BPZ Resources	04/11/07	Outperform	292	****
Walter Industries	12/18/06	Outperform	215	****
Intuitive Surgical (Nasdaq: ISRG)	10/17/06	Outperform	164	****

Data from CAPS.

So what is this investor looking at these days? Here are a few of his most recent calls on CAPS:

Company	Date Picked	Call	CAPS Rating
UBS (NYSE: UBS)	03/19/08	Underperform	*
Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM)	03/7/08	Underperform	*
Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM)	03/7/08	Underperform	**

Data from CAPS.

While not all of these picks may pan out, they could be a good place to start further research. I decided to take a closer look at UBS.

Why you stick to your knitting
Taking a look over the battlefield of fallen financial soldiers, a bit of a theme becomes obvious. Some of the biggest losers in the whole fiasco are companies that stepped outside their expertise thinking that they could take down some big, easy profits.

Merrill Lynch, with its great franchise in financial advisory services, was way up there among the biggest losers thanks to a lack of risk control at the top. Citigroup, which has a great global banking business, can't seem to stop the bleeding from its investment banking division. And of course there's UBS, which managed to bring a scourge on the house of its banking business by gambling in complex securities.

UBS, now billions of dollars poorer, has a new chairman and is trying to pick up the pieces. The bank has its work cut out for it as there's no assurance that the balance sheet explosions are over. Though investors seem to have gotten more sanguine on the financial industry, that's hardly a sure sign that we've gotten past the worst of it.

On CAPS, UBS has more than its share of critics and as a result carries a bottom rung one-star rating. Back in March, CAPS All-Star cdulan predicted that the problems would get worse for UBS. This CAPS player cited a number of problems, including rumors that it dumped a chunk of its Alt-A portfolio because of liquidity concerns and the fact that it still has a huge amount of repurchase agreements. Fellow All-Star TMFBent recently tagged on with the punchier: "Wow, this pile of junk still has more to lose. Who'dda thunk it?"

So what's your take on UBS? Get in the action by clicking over to CAPS. Joining the 100,000-member community is absolutely free.

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