Stock Smackdown: Cramer vs. CAPS

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There's no denying that Mad Money host Jim Cramer is entertaining, popular, and passionate. On many occasions, he's even right. So he's smart, funny, and the closest thing to a stock market rock star -- but is he smarter than you?

Cramming for Cramer
The Fool's free investing community, Motley Fool CAPS, aggregates the opinions of more than 135,000 members to assign ratings for each stock's likelihood of outperforming or underperforming the market.

Below, we look at some top stocks that Cramer picked and panned during last week's "lightning rounds" and compare them with how some in the CAPS community rate them.

Stock	Lightning Round Show Day	Cramer's Rating	CAPS Rating (out of five)
Merck (NYSE: MRK)	Monday	Bearish	***
Johnson Controls	Monday	Bearish	***
Brocade Communications (Nasdaq: BRCD)	Tuesday	Bullish	**
Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK)	Tuesday	Bearish	****
DryShips (Nasdaq: DRYS)	Wednesday	Bearish	***
Home Depot (NYSE: HD)	Wednesday	Bullish	***
Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)	Thursday	Bullish	**
Tenet Healthcare (NYSE: THC)	Thursday	Bearish	**
United Technologies	Friday	Bullish	**
Walgreen	Friday	Bullish	***

Cramer says
With President Obama hoping to introduce a sweeping government health-care program, Jim Cramer says an investment in health-care services companies like Tenet Healthcare is just too difficult to make. The company's financials add to the difficulty.

Tenet Health is just OK ... Tenet Health is a very difficult stock to own ... because the balance sheet is not that good ... we are not sure what the health care reform is going to look like ... it has been bouncing between $3 and $4 ... and $2 and $4 ... I say do not buy ... I checked in with my friend [Sheryl Sklolnick] who told me to buy it when it was at $2, it was for CRT Capital ... no longer has conviction, I do not have conviction.

CAPS says
That's a sentiment shared by some members of the CAPS community. Although some All-Stars such as Barebonez like to think Tenet Healthcare will rebound once again after a technical correction, others such as Ewok82 believe a government health-care program would affect the company directly and are skeptical about how hospital groups would manage to prosper.

The Obama health care initiative has given hope to some of these hospital groups, but if the plan will really cut 2 trillion dollars from health care budget over the next few years, where do they think the cuts will come from? Do they think the hospitals will get paid more and everyone else will get paid less? Once the hype fades, "for-profit" hospitals will become the main targets of reimbursement cuts.

Although the 129 stocks that make up the Health care Providers and Services sector in CAPS have advanced 3% on average over the past month, Tenet Healthcare has declined nearly 11%. And though the average company in the sector has an above-average four-star rating, Tenet rates two stars, meaning CAPS members think there's a better than average chance that it will underperform the market.

Your say
While some CAPS members may stand with Jim Cramer or against him, the investor intelligence community is more than what some All-Stars think, even if they are TV personalities. What do you think? Is Cramer right or off his rocker? Why not head to CAPS right now and offer your thoughts on whether Tenet Healthcare will be a success.

Motley Fool CAPS is a great place to start your own research on these stocks. Read a company's financial reports, scrutinize key data and charts, and examine the comments your fellow investors have made -- all from a stock's CAPS page. Best of all, it's free.