A 1-in-100 Investor

The first 100 days in office set the tone for any new president. Similarly, 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 who made some of their best stock selections early on, and seeing which ones they think will be best next.

One of our highest-rated CAPS members is AirForceFool, who sports a top 99.94 member rating. A member since August 2006, AirForceFool currently has 191 active picks on CAPS out of 1,380 stock picks made. Achieving 83% accuracy, AirForceFool has attracted 199 "groupies," CAPS members who've listed this leading investor as one of their favorites.

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

Source: Motley Fool CAPS. *Price when call was made. Current score is how many points a member is beating (lagging) the S&P500 index from the time of the call.

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

Degree of risk
Mortgage backer Fannie Mae is a detestable little company. It required a huge influx of tax money to rescue it after years of profligate spending, coddling by politicians, and pillaging by government appointees who used it as a private piggy bank for lining their own pockets.

Yet as investors, we need to look past the emotion of the government bailout and decide whether the stock is a good investment now. Over the past month, Fannie has jumped 60%, meaning it's just about quadrupled in price in the last six months. As CAPS All-Star mtopper points out, it doesn't make sense that a company should continue to post massive losses and still increase in value.

However, a lot of the thinking amongst investors is that with the full faith and credit of the taxpayer's wallet backing this enterprise, the chance it's going to be allowed to go under seems remote. "The Gov't. is not going to allow them to go broke and out of business," says another All-Star member, 4everlost. "So the odds of the price of the stock going up are much higher than the odds of it going down."

American International Group (NYSE:AIG), after all, went to the well three times, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together back about $5 trillion in mortgages. Allowing them to fail would seemingly wreck havoc with the economy, making it hard to imagine that the government will actually unwind their businesses as jaygatsby49 suggests:

Going to zero. Day traders can drive it up and down all they want but in the long run (technically the short run because it's only a few months away) this puppy will mostly likely drop to zero after the government reveals its plan to wind down FRE and FNM in February.

If anything, the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers failure a year ago shows not that government intervention has solved the crisis, but rather that it was part and parcel the cause of it.

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?