A 1-in-100 Investor

Presidents are often 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 over the first year of our CAPS 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 investor is Novavm, who sports a nearly perfect 99.96 player rating. A participant since September 2006, Novavm currently has 195 active picks on CAPS out of more than 790 stock picks made. Achieving better than 72% accuracy, Novavm has also attracted 136 "groupies," CAPS players who've listed this leading investor as one of their favorites.

Here are a few of the most recent stock selections and their ratings.

Source: Motley Fool CAPS.
*Price when call was made.
Current score is how many points a player is beating (lagging) the S&P500 index from the time of the call.

A mutually exclusive opportunity
Over the past month or so, Novavm has been both bearish and bullish in equal measure. This investor has given the nod to metals companies and the hook to financials. Considering the Bear Stearns debacle, it's understandable why peer Lehman Brothers, for example, gets an underperform rating. The investment broker is being regarded as among the weakest and possibly a high risk for default itself. Nor did it help that Lehman raised $4 billion by selling shares when it said it didn't need the money. Then again, maybe it did help: Lehman actually raised more money than it initially said it would, and short-sellers were caught by the surprising news that there was such demand for Lehman stock. The investment banker's stock rallied 18% on the report.

Bank in February, another CAPS All-Star, TMFWBuffettJr, with a 97.87 player rating, called Lehman a "ticking time bomb" that will go off when it has to write down all of the bad debt it holds. Here's an excerpt:

The credit [crisis] is not over. ... Lehman is hiding things again, but this time they won't be able to hide them until a recovery. ... They will eventually have to write down all the debt and derivatives they were caught with. They were pushing them through like all the other banks, but also like them they got caught without a chair when the music stopped. Now they have what I believe are billions and billions of the very worst loans. ... They will have to write those down. ... [T]hey want to project themselves to be like Goldman Sachs -- too smart to get into the mess -- but they are not.

Perhaps raising money when it supposedly didn't need any is a portent of things to come for Lehman.

A 1-in-100 opportunity
Some of the best and smartest players in the CAPS investor-intelligence community have banked their opinion on Lehman Brothers. But have we heard from you? 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 since it's free to sign up, why not use this opportunity to take your best shot?