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 opinions 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 top stocks that Cramer picked and panned during last week's "lightning rounds" and compare them with how the CAPS community sees their future.

Cramer says
The demise of Circuit City is adding to Best Buy's industry-leading position, and when you incorporate Cramer's optimism, he finds the electronics retailer an irresistible buy.

I am liking Best Buy for market share purposes ... I am liking it because I think that the US economy is coming back ... I am liking it because it is best in show in the category ... I think that that is a good situation

CAPS says
Though 84% of the more than 3,000 members rating Best Buy on CAPS think it will outperform the market, its low two-star rating suggests they believe there are better prospects for your money. Yet bchristianson1 anticipated Cramer's arguments and made pretty much the same pitch.

In the wake of Circuit City, BBY has gained market share and has a great reputation in the community. As the economy rises out of recession in the coming years, consumers will increase spending on electronics.

This Fool says
My concern about Best Buy is that electronics sales are on the wane. Despite the fact that prices on televisions decreased 20% in the first quarter (and industry analysts at DisplaySearch expected them to have dropped another 3% in the second quarter), Best Buy's consumer electronics sales contracted 8.8% in the first quarter while same-store sales fell more than 6%. That's partly because of growing unemployment and because there were no government stimulus checks to spend.

As unemployment rises, other things become more important than a big-screen TV, and consumers aren't as confident about an economic recovery as Cramer is.

The Consumer Electronics Association is saying it expects wholesale-unit shipments to climb 14% this year, but the researchers at Stifel Nicholas are reporting that only 20% of the consumers they surveyed at the end of July plan to buy a high-definition TV, down from the 23% who planned to do so back in April.

Your say
While CAPS members may stand with Cramer or on opposite sides of the field, the investor-intelligence community is more than what some All-Stars think, even if they are TV personalities. What do you think? Is Cramer right -- or off his rocker?

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, it's free.