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?

Cramming for Cramer
The Fool's free investing community, Motley Fool CAPS, aggregates the opinion of more than 135,000 members to assign ratings for each stock's likelihood of outperforming or underperforming the market.

Below, we look at some leading stocks that Cramer picked and panned during last week's Mad Money "lightning rounds," and we'll compare them with how the CAPS community sees their future.

Cramer says …
When the competition started brewing up impressive gains, Starbucks resorted to a mishmash of initiatives to give its growth a caffeinated jolt. It's going to start serving alcohol in a few locations and hiding its name in others, while it unveils the bane of coffee drinkers everywhere -- instant coffee! But it did manage to post a better-than-expected earnings report this quarter.

Jim Cramer thinks CEO Howard Schultz is on the right track and has always said the turnaround would involve a longer journey than the market typically expects. With good ideas on the menu, Cramer likes Starbucks stock:

I think that Howard Schultz has got it together. ... If anyone remembers, he did say it was going to be not just an eight-month, nine-month, 10-month but an 18-month turn ... he's got the gross margins going up now ... he's got a whole bunch of new product offerings. ... I would not let Starbucks go. ... I am a buyer of SBUX here ... not a seller. ... [T]hat does not mean, for one minute, that I am backing away from McDonald's ... which has a fantastic coffee initiative ... and I am going to reiterate that I am a buyer of MCD at $58.

CAPS says …
In CAPS, the stock carries a low two-star rating, and 23% of more than 7,000 CAPS members rate it as an "underperform." CAPS member ChannelDunlap goes so far as to see an unflattering postscript for Starbucks one day.

Someday Starbucks will be a punchline. "Hey did you see that guy who opened a ton of stores selling very common but overpriced items?! Oh my god, what a Starbucks! Hahaha."

CAPS All-Star Metamagnet thinks the unrelenting recession will grind down the King of Grinds, while its many new gimmicks suggest that Starbucks is no longer a haven of the trendy: "The recession is not nearly over yet which will hurt existing sales. But more importantly, Starbucks has lost the cool cache it had several years back, and other coffee houses make better coffee (e.g. [Caribou Coffee]) which will gradually erode their market."

Your say
While CAPS members may stand with Jim Cramer or on opposite sides of the field, the investor-intelligence community is more than what some All-Stars think, even if some of them are TV personalities. But what do you think? Is Cramer right, or is he off his rocker? No need to hedge your thoughts on CAPS, so head off right now and let us know whether Starbucks is a stock still worth serving up piping hot.

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