Great Call on Google! What's Next?

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been busy lately. This is hardly a surprise, though, since taking on tech heavyweights like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Apple, and Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), along with upstarts like Facebook and Twitter, all at the same time is not something you can do sitting down.

The company has been pushing hard to snatch a portion of the cell-phone market with its Android-based phones. It's also getting ready to start building a high-speed fiber network. It's even entered the power trading market (no, that's not a typo).

Admittedly, not everything is going smoothly for the Big G. Among other things, it's been locked in heated battle with China, while its efforts to enter the social-networking world have created quite a flap.

But what do investors think of Google these days? The stock has collected more than 12,500 outperform ratings on the Motley Fool CAPS community, but it's also drawn enough underperforms to put it at a mediocre three-star rating.

Despite the stock's ho-hum rating, quite a number of CAPS members have scored big by betting on Google. The current score leader on Google, cjlee001, has racked up nearly 100 points by making four correct outperform calls on the stock.

This CAPS member is ranked just below All-Star status, having racked up more than 4,000 points while posting an accuracy rate of 45%. Google isn't this player's only great call. Here's a look at a few other prescient picks:

Data from CAPS.

So what has this investor been looking at more recently? Here are a few of the most recent calls on CAPS:

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 UBS.

A banking calamity
To many, the idea of investing in major financial institutions still seems like a dicey proposition. And as UBS' two-star CAPS rating suggests, it is among the least-liked of the big global banks.

This shouldn't come as any surprise, as the bank's performance over the past few years has been on the wrong side of disastrous. For the full year 2008, UBS lost around $20 billion thanks to a massive loss from trading activities. But this is only half of it. Before the quarter ended December 2009, UBS had reported only one profitable quarter since mid-2007.

And while the $1.2 billion profit for the fourth quarter is certainly encouraging, the bank still has to deal with waves of wealthy clients yanking their money as its reputation gets battered by poor performance and tax shenanigans with some of its U.S. clients.

Going against the grain
Over the past year, many of the big banking names have been some of the market's best performers as they benefitted from no longer being on death watch. Interestingly, though, UBS has been one of the worst performers among the biggest banks. So is it time for this Swiss financier to turn it around?

CAPS All-Star mango052 is on the same page as cjlee001, and recently gave UBS stock a thumbs-up, highlighting the bank's new management:

UBS is digging itself out of the hole the previous management has put them in. In a year or two, they will be back to large profits once again. It is still one of the largest banks world wide. The risk profile has been drastically reduced and the new management team under [Oswald Grubel] is working hard to put the tax evasion story behind them.

If there's one thing for sure, it's that Grubel has his work cut out for him. He was previously lauded for leading a stellar charge at Credit Suisse -- a bank that didn't end up with nearly the problems that UBS did. But it goes without saying that the banking environment isn't nearly what it was between 2004 and 2007.

However, if UBS pulls itself together, the rewards for investors could be impressive, even after the past year's run. Based on current analyst estimates, UBS stock is trading at just over nine times expected 2010 earnings. Meanwhile, the stock's current price-to-book ratio is sitting at around 1.3, which is less than half what the stock traded at for much of the past decade.

But here's the important question: What's your take? Is UBS on the path to recovery? Or does the bank have more dark days ahead? Get in the action by clicking over to CAPS. It's absolutely free and already has more than 150,000 stock pickers chipping in to find the best stocks out there.

Does this annoying, but oh-so-important, advice apply to UBS?