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?

The Fool's free investing community, Motley Fool CAPS, aggregates the opinion of more than 120,000 members to assign ratings for each stock's likelihood of outperforming or underperforming the market. For the first 20 months since we began tracking the CAPS community's collective intelligence in late 2006, the data shows that newly minted five-star stocks offer the best opportunities for investors, while lowest-rated companies fared the worst.

Cramming for Cramer
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:

Source: TheStreet.com and CAPS.

Cramer says...
As the economy unwinds, tech spending by the biggest firms tends to unwind with it. Cisco expects U.S. orders for its networking products to slow, particularly among financial-services firms. Jim Cramer expected weak first-quarter results, but said that if investors were interested in an equipment manufacturer, they should ignore Alcatel-Lucent and buy Cisco instead.

Come on!... Sell, sell, sell! (Alcatel-Lucent)... There's nothing cooking there at all! If you want networking equipment, you know I'm always going to send you to big-man, Cisco...Cisco is about to report...I suspect a not-great quarter, but the stock is so low that I would pull the trigger!

CAPS says...
On Cisco, Jim Cramer and the CAPS community agree. More than 93% of the All-Star members of the investor intelligence community think the networking equipment leader will outperform the market. This stock has been highly rated since the CAPS service began, often bumping up to a top five-star rating.

Many members understand that the company's immediate future may be difficult, considering the economy. But as CAPS member BradL401 notes, it's still a stock to own for the long haul:

Long term, [Cisco] is still a great IT infrastructure company to own, and the current prices are relatively cheap, but companies are going to delay their purchases of large ticket hardware for a while until they see growth on the horizon. This will hold [Cisco] down in the short term.

Elsewhere on the fight card...
Cramer and CAPS managed to agree on a few companies last week, like Bristol-Myers Squibb. which the Mad Money star likes because it's cash-rich and high-yielding. But they diverged over Intel. Cramer thinks it might be a good stock to own 100 years from now, but not today. Meanwhile, CAPS member akilahkt finds the semiconductor firm so far ahead of the competition that it really has none to speak of:

Intel is now in a field of its own, no other semiconductor company can match its product line. AMD does compete in the CPU area, but has too many problems to effectively match Intel. Meanwhile Intel will build ground against [NVIDIA] as it enters the GPU market in a major way. In this industry having capital and cash provides great advantages, and Intel can capitalize on its scale.

Intel's stock price will not turn seriously north until there is any sign of economic recovery, but when it does it will be profound. I think there is a good chance the price of an Intel share will be $30 in two years or less.

Your say
CAPS members may stand with Jim Cramer, or in opposite corners of the ring. But the investor intelligence community is more than the musings of a select group of All-Stars -- even if they are TV personalities. What do you think? Is Cramer right, or off his rocker? Why not head to CAPS right now, and sound off with your thoughts on any of the stocks we've discussed above.

Motley Fool CAPS is a great place to start your own research on stocks like these. 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!