Stock Smackdown: Cramer vs. CAPS

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 opinion of more than 145,000 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 to how the CAPS community sees their future.

Cramer says:
Prices may have bounced off their lows, but natural gas is still a depressed commodity. Jim Cramer believes it's just too dangerous for average investors wanting to play the sector to take a position in the United States Natural Gas ETF:

Listen man, you have got to go buy Getting Back to Even, and go buy it now… I literally tell you why that is one of the most dangerous games in the world… you do not want to be in that natural gas ETF… it is just so problematic, it is just awful… I do not want you in it or the United States Oil ETF, or any of the ETF’s involving physical commodities other than the SPDR Gold ETF, which is gold.

CAPS says:
The CAPS community doesn't see the same danger that Cramer does; 96% of the Fools who've rated the ETF believe it will outperform the broad market indexes. Highly rated CAPS All-Star FreeMortal admits that even if the fund doesn't always walk in lockstep with the price of the commodity, over the long haul, it will catch up:

I have quite a bit of UNG in my real live portfolio, much to my chagrin. As other Fools have noted, UNG doesn't always closely follow natural gas prices, making this a rather dubious ETF for making a commodity play.

Still I'm green thumbing this because I'm very bullish on natural gas and I have confidence that UNG will catch up... eventually.

This Fool says:
In this case, I have to agree with the Mad Money host: United States Natural Gas is a dangerous play. Its inherent risks were demonstrated last year, when the ETF began trading at a big premium to its NAV, causing management to refuse to issue new shares after it ran out of its original allotment.

Because it's a commodity ETF that tracks an underlying basket of securities and futures contracts on natural gas, USNG rolls its positions every month as contracts expire. Futures pools like USNG need to issue shares on a regular basis to track the underlying shares. But when the U.S. Commodity Futures Trade Commission began investigating whether speculators were responsible for high gas prices, the ETF opted not to issue those shares. It feared it might end up having to divest itself of a large amount of its holdings, should the regulator impose limits on the size of positions that commodity funds could hold.

The price of USNG has collapsed 47% over the past year. With the prospects for natural gas prices themselves looking lackluster for the immediate future, the ETF seems like a hard sell this winter.

Have your say
Whether CAPS members stand with Jim Cramer, or on opposite sides of the field, our investor intelligence community is more than the opinions of a handful of All-Stars -- even if they are TV personalities. What do you think? Is Cramer right, or off his rocker? The contents are hot over on CAPS, but it's still a gas to share your views on the United States Natural Gas CAPS page, and share with us what its future looks like to you.

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.