The 1-in-100 Investor

Presidents are measured by what they achieve during their first 100 days in office. Schools have parties for students on the 100th day of the school year. When Jerry Yang returned to Yahoo! last summer, he gave himself 100 days to effect change at the online portal.

Around here at Motley Fool CAPS, we keep an eye on the 100-day mark, too. Some of our best investors -- we call them All-Stars -- have achieved top player ratings after garnering a score of 100 in their first 100 days on CAPS. Analysis has shown that the top-rated stocks have had the best performance in our first year of tracking, so might we assume that when the best players rate the best stocks, there is a correlation as well?

One of our highest-rated CAPS investors is StatsGeek, who has a 99.98 player rating. A player since December 2006, StatsGeek now has 173 active picks on CAPS out of more than 900. Achieving better than 78% accuracy, StatsGeek has also attracted more than 1,200 "groupies" -- CAPS players who've listed this leading investor as one of their favorites.

Here are a few recent stock selections and how they were rated.

With a better than 25-point gain on uranium miner Denison Mines, StatsGeek is handily doing well on this group of picks.

Let's take a closer look at another uranium miner, Cameco, which our All-Star has marked for outperformance. This company might soon feel earnings pressure as a result of the world's uranium supply getting ahead of demand. Uranium prices are expected to continue falling in the near term, and the energy crisis in South Africa seeps into this and other industries -- platinum, gold, coal, and diamond mines. All are affected; they've been told to cut back on energy usage.

This situation could work to the advantage of Cameco, which is based in Canada, the world's largest producer of uranium. Cameco operates the McArthur River mine, the world's largest uranium mine. As buyers look for alternative sources for their supply, Cameco could end up standing astride, well, a gold mine.

A glowing opportunity
With more than 900 investors weighing in on Cameco over at CAPS, almost 98% of them agree with StatsGeek that the uranium miner will outperform the market. The biggest argument in its favor is the assumption that nuclear energy will again be seen as a viable low-cost source for meeting the world's power needs.

Top-rated All-Star tuffsledding, with a 99.90 player rating, has problems with biofuels that use food crops to generate energy, particularly when there is an alternative in nuclear power, in this pitch from early last month.

Eventually, people, even our politicians, will figure out that Nuclear energy is more Green and far more efficient than Ethanol. Does anybody besides me have an ethical problem with burning food for energy when millions of people are starving???

Another All-Star, mirwin52, in a recent pitch doesn't foresee massive uranium supplies being dumped on the market anytime soon, particularly when there are sufficient supplies available now.

Best of breed pure uranium play. ... There will not be any more massive dumps of uranium stockpiles onto the market, so the price has nowhere to go but up. Great time to buy, with U3O8 [yellowcake, concentrated uranium oxide] price beaten down recently.

Not everyone agrees that Cameco's operations will do well. In early February, CAPS investor subvertical saw the desire of Cameco's Russian supplier (which sells decommissioned weapons-grade uranium to be converted into commercial grade) as wanting to renegotiate the price as a sign that costs will be increasing, putting pressure on earnings.

Russia will be charging more for the weapons uranium to be announced. [Cameco] is paying less than $10/pound and spot for U has been around $85 recently. ... If the rate rises to current price, there will be an additional loss [in] earnings per share.

A 1-in-100 opportunity
Some of the best and smartest players in the CAPS investor intelligence community have glowingly sung the praises of Cameco. But we haven't heard from you yet. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky once noted, "You miss 100% of the shots you never take."

At Motley Fool CAPS every investor's opinion counts and it's free to sign up, so why not use this opportunity to take your best shot?