Bridgeway Funds founder John Montgomery has spent the past decade making a name for himself with two cornerstone funds -- Aggressive Investors and Ultra-Small Company. Both funds have absolutely plastered the S&P 500 during that same time, amassing average returns north of 20% annually since their inception in 1994.

Unfortunately, both funds are now closed, so you and I are left outside the party. Montgomery closed the funds while they were still very nimble -- an extremely shareholder-friendly move. Ultra-Small Company has less than $125 million of assets currently under management.

What's under the hood?
Though his funds are closed, we can still learn a lot from the stocks Montgomery is picking. So how is one of the brightest fund managers in the land putting his assets to work right now, and are these good stocks or not?

To examine that question, we're going to gauge Montgomery's holdings in the Ultra-Small Company fund using our brand new Motley Fool CAPS community intelligence database. Although the service is still in beta testing, it's already aggregating the opinions of both individual and professional investors in its drive to rate every publicly traded stock on a one- to five-star scale.

Not surprisingly, a number of Montgomery's picks are quite highly rated ideas:

Company

CAPS Rating

EZCorp

Two stars

Vaalco Energy

Five stars

Novatel (NASDAQ:NGPS)

Three stars

Intevac

Four stars

US Xpress Enterprises (NASDAQ:XPRSA)

No rating

Celadon Group (NASDAQ:CLDN)

Five stars

US Global Investors (NASDAQ:GROW)

Four stars

PW Eagle Industries (NASDAQ:PWEI)

Four stars

Matrix Service (NASDAQ:MTRX)

No rating

CPI (NYSE:CPY)

One star

Data from Motley Fool CAPS.

Your next step
If a proven stock picker like John Montgomery likes a stock and it's highly-rated by other investors in Motley Fool CAPS, it might be worth researching further. And that's why CAPS exists: to generate ideas and help more individual investors beat the market.

So if you'd like to take a look at some high-rated stocks or see what other investors are saying about the stocks you already own, join the free beta test of CAPS today. The revolution is just beginning.

Fool contributor Ryan Angell owns no shares of the stocks mentioned in this article. He does have a CAPS rating of "outperform" on Vaalco Energy, however. The Fool has a disclosure policy.