"Investors helping investors beat the market." That's how The Motley Fool's CAPS community describes itself, and to date there are more than 124,000 CAPS members doing just that. And in today's environment, we all need all the help we can get.
Day in and day out, CAPS members share their thoughts on thousands of stocks while CAPS’ behind-the-scenes rating algorithms rank both members and stocks. All this makes it easy to find the best-performing stock pickers and the community's favorite stocks.
But with almost 3 million stock recommendations on nearly 5,400 stocks, not to mention those 124,000 member portfolios and a countless number of member blogs, the big question is where to start. Though there's no right answer, I thought I'd set you on your travels with some of the best of the community’s comments over the past week.
The best of the best weigh in
Current Top Fool on CAPS dwot is continuing to ride out the great picks she made through August of this year and hasn't added any new picks lately. The nine Fools nipping at her heels in the CAPS rankings, however, haven't been as quiet this week. EverydayInvestor, who has an impressive stock-picking accuracy of 88% and more than 8,000 points, gave General Growth Properties
Goldminingxpert also found some places to get pessimistic. Among his picks for the week were underperform calls on Ford
Not all of the top players have been sticking to the bearish side, though. AirForceFool made outperform calls on General Electric
I think energy is currently really oversold. The price might go down in the short run, but in the long run they aren't making more of this stuff.
Want more? You can quickly track down the full portfolios of CAPS' top members by clicking here.
Let's blog it out
CAPS blogs are a great way for members to share broad market thoughts, or to get more in-depth on a particular stock idea or investment theme. Every week, members are adding reams of great new insight in this part of the community.
One popular blog over the past week was jeffduby's, featuring his dim view of the market and investor sentiment. After a ream of terrible economic data, jeffduby throws up his hands at the fact that stocks rallied. Do you agree with his pessimism? Click over to his blog to read his thoughts and share some of your own.
And while jeffduby concerns himself with swings in the equity market, TMFSinchiruna is firmly focused on the gold market. Convinced that gold prices are being heavily manipulated by traders, Sinchiruna thinks they’re are set to soar within the next few months. Ready to get the details? Well, click through to the blog.
Worried about the current economic situation? Then you may want to skip the recent blog post from dwot. This Top Fool may not be picking new stocks, but she sure does keep up on her blog -- click through to find out why her real portfolio is still firmly on the sidelines.
Stock pickers' delight
And for the stock pickers out there, articles throughout the week on Fool.com have been highlighting some interesting stock ideas based on CAPS community data. Earlier in the week, I took a look at a handful of stocks trading at "value" multiples and named CAPS' favorite of the bunch "America's Next Top Value Stock."
Fellow Fool Brian Pacampara has been diving into CAPS data, too, and he’s determined that Philip Morris International
You can go your own way
But of course, all of this just scratches the surface of CAPS, and there's no right or wrong way to use the wealth of information our members have contributed. If nothing above caught your fancy, you can always just click on through to CAPS and blaze your own trail.
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