A 1-in-100 Investor

Just as the first 100 days in office set the tone for any new president, Motley Fool CAPS keeps an eye on how well investors do in their first 100 days. Some of our best -- we call them All-Stars -- have achieved scores of 100 on stock selections in their first 100 days on CAPS. In this column, we're looking at our best members to see who made some of their best stock selections early on -- and we also want to see which stocks those same leaders think will be the next good bets.

One of our highest-rated CAPS members is wcwhiner, who sports a 99.90 member rating. A member since October 2006, wcwhiner has 194 active picks on CAPS out of more than 1,600 picks made. Achieving 79% accuracy, wcwhiner has attracted 179 "groupies," CAPS members who've listed this leading investor as one of their favorites.

Here are a few of this leading member's most recent stock selections and how they were rated.

Source: Motley Fool CAPS. *Price when the call was made. Current score is how many points a member is beating (lagging) the S&P 500 index from the time of the call.

Let's look at what other CAPS members are saying about a few of these stocks and whether they agree with wcwhiner's assessment.

Degree of risk
Private insurers understand that if President Obama succeeds in pushing a nationalized health-care system through Congress, the jig is up. A government-run insurance plan will crowd out private enterprise, despite all the rhetoric saying that it will simply "compete" with them. Investors know this, too. Shares of insurers such as United Health Group have been weighed down by the possibility that a public "option" would become a reality.

Recent negotiations in Washington, however, seemed to have dampened the chances of implementing such a system, and coupled with UnitedHealth's own positive earnings guidance, its shares have rebounded with a 13% increase over the past month.

Some investors think UnitedHealth comes out on top regardless of which way the debate goes, simply because the government can't do everything it wants to do on this front. Writes CAPS member dnhffrnn:

This Company has a very strong financial position and the ability to be a huge player in the potential Health Care restructuring. The Feds do not have the resources to manage the changes they envision. They will need to outsource.

A generic concern
Generic drugs represented more than $58 billion of the pharmaceutical market in 2007. That's big, and the real opportunity is yet to come, as the value of branded drugs losing patent protection through 2012, when they will account for 20% of the drug market, totals some $70 billion. It would be a real shame, then, to see that opportunity wasted if allegations about sidestepping quality-control procedures -- such as the ones that generic-drug leader Mylan dealt with recently -- become pervasive.

This is Mylan's game to lose. It just raised its annual earnings guidance by as much as 13%, estimates that are far ahead of analyst expectations. The generic-drug maker denied the allegations against it, and the stock has recovered some of the ground it lost in the wake of the report, but the FDA disputes Mylan's contention that the case is closed. Should more damaging information come out, it would be a bitter pill for investors to swallow.

CAPS member tickertale thinks the sell-off "of a well positioned generic drug maker" was a little overwrought and figured the panic that initially set in would eventually give way to cooler heads prevailing.

A 1-in-100 opportunity
Some of the best and smartest members in the CAPS investor-intelligence community have made their mark, but it pays to start your own research on these stocks on Motley Fool CAPS. 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.

As hockey great Wayne Gretzky once noted, "You miss 100% of the shots you never take." At Motley Fool CAPS every investor's opinion counts. And since it's free to sign up, why not use this opportunity to take your best shot?