Great Call on Home Depot! What's Next?

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If your main business is selling tools, appliances, lumber, and various other home improvement products, then the worst housing market in decades is likely to be painful on your bottom line. As the world's largest home improvement retailer, Home Depot (NYSE: HD) can certainly attest to the truth of this. For its fiscal year that ended in February, Home Depot's earnings per share suffered a 40% drop.

Home Depot's stock is down roughly 40% from where it was before recession set in, and The Motley Fool's CAPS community has stuck the retailer with a lackluster two-star rating (out of a possible five). That doesn't mean that all CAPS members have shared this pessimism though. Since early last year, CAPS member jmf1957 has made a number of short-term outperform calls on Home Depot's stock and has been on the money with every one of them. To date, jmf1957 has racked up 98 points on these savvy picks.

jmf1957 is one of CAPS' All-Stars -- players with a rating of 80 or greater -- and has managed an impressive stock-picking accuracy of 64% while racking up more than 4,400 points. Home Depot isn't this player's only great call. Here's a look at a few of the other prescient picks:

Company	Date Picked	Call	Points	CAPS Rating (out of 5)
Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU)	12/10/08	Outperform	184	***
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX)	12/8/08	Outperform	150	****
Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC)	2/24/09	Outperform	93	***

Data from CAPS.

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

Company	Date Picked	Call	CAPS Rating (out of 5)
Boeing (NYSE: BA)	6/26/09	Outperform	***
Bank of America (NYSE: BAC)	6/18/09	Outperform	***
Citigroup (NYSE: C)	6/18/09	Outperform	**

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 Boeing.

The 787 nightmare
It's tough to talk about Boeing right now without discussing the migraines the company has been experiencing over its 787 Dreamliner. The plane's timetable had already been delayed numerous times before the latest trip-up last week, when Boeing disclosed that structural issues were going to postpone the plane's first flight.

If Boeing were serving up dinner rather than planes, it probably would have already seen a good deal of its customers give up on its filet mignon and head over to Timmy's Taco Shack. But breadth of suppliers isn't exactly a defining feature of the airplane manufacturing industry, so although Boeing has lost a bunch of orders for the Dreamliner, it's held onto more than 800, which far outpaces the orders so far for the A350 that Airbus has been designing.

Nobody likes a flake, whether it's a friend, an airplane manufacturer, or a U.S. state (I'm looking at you, California). Hopefully, Boeing can get itself back on track and figure out how to be a more dependable supplier for its customers. As the recent cancellation from Qantas showed, it has some tough economic headwinds to fight, so avoiding repeatedly shooting itself in the foot is more important than ever right now.

The CAPS community hasn't been overly convinced that Boeing will be able to right itself. Though there have been more than 3,000 outperform ratings, there have been enough underperform ratings on the stock to keep it at a three-star rating. However, many of CAPS' top-performing members have come out on the bullish side, including checklist34, who had this to say in January:

BA is paying a solid dividend, expected to be profitable next year, the 787 will eventually come, and you can still buy at prices lower than BA sold for nearly 15 years ago.

It isn't going to be the biggest booming stock over the next 2-5 years, but Boeing is eternal and will not be gone, the 787 will come, the markets will recover, the recession will end, and this will, eventually, see a new all time high. Which will make it a 3 or 4 bagger someday.

I find myself agreeing with checklist34 and jmf1957 on the long-term potential of Boeing and have given its stock a thumbs-up in my own CAPS portfolio. But here's the important question: What's your take on it? Will the Dreamliner struggles adversely impact the company in the long term? Get in the action by clicking over to CAPS. It's absolutely free and already has more than 135,000 stock pickers chipping in to find the best stocks out there.

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