Great Call on Best Buy! What's Next?

If the consumer is dead, then there must be zombies shopping at Best Buy (NYSE:BBY). Though investors might have been inclined to sell this Motley Fool Stock Advisor pick over the past year, it has easily outpaced lackluster competitors like Circuit City and consistently topped Wall Street's earnings estimates.

Despite Best Buy's buoyant performance, investors haven't had much to show for it lately. The stock is up less than 2% year over year. That's better than a stick in the eye, especially with the S&P declining 13% in the same period, but some investors have gotten more out of Best Buy's stock.

CAPS member BruceInCola can tell you all about that. Since April 2007, he's made three calls on Best Buy, and he's been right every time. BruceInCola is one of CAPS' All-Stars -- players with a rating of 80 or greater -- and he's managed an impressive stock picking accuracy of 64% on his calls. Best Buy hasn't been his only great call. Here's a look at a few of his other prescient picks:

Data from CAPS.

So what is this investor looking at these days? Here are a few of his 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 some further research. I decided to take a closer look at XL Capital.

X-tra Large headaches
At this point, it's all about rebuilding for XL Capital. The insurance sector has been struggling, and while XL is one of the top-dog property and casualty reinsurers out there, that's nowhere near the company's primary worry.

Not too long ago, XL spun off a financial guarantor called Security Capital Assurance -- now known as Syncora Holdings. If "financial guarantor" doesn't set off any alarms for you, think of companies along the lines of MBIA (NYSE:MBI) or FGIC. Likely looking to cash in on the good times, XL went public with this subsidiary back in August 2006. But -- and that's a big "but" here -- it retained a big chunk of ownership, and it set up a bunch of guarantee and reinsurance agreements with Syncora.

The market has been brutal to financial guarantors lately, and it hasn't spared Syncora. The stock, which debuted at $20, is currently struggling to stay above $2, and its financial results look disastrous. But what does this all mean for XL? Well, until late July, it meant a lot, since XL would be on the hook if Syncora took a sharp turn south. But XL took matters into its own hands, further cutting ties with Syncora by paying it nearly $1.8 billion in cash and giving it 8 million XL common shares to cancel the vast majority of XL's obligations.

Now XL must battle on despite its wounds, weather the insurance-industry downturn, and recapture its once-ironclad ratings. If it can pull this off, investors who take a chance on this wounded giant could see some significant upside.

On CAPS, the consensus is decidedly bearish, with 254 underperform ratings versus just 180 outperforms. However, Fools should note that many of these underperform ratings preceded the agreement that XL reached with Syncora to end its obligations. Since the agreement, there have still been new underperform ratings, but opinion's been decidedly more mixed on the whole.

So what's your take on XL? Is the one-star rating misleading? Get in the action by clicking over to CAPS. Our online investing community is absolutely free, and we already have more than 115,000 stock pickers chipping in to find the market's best stocks.

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