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 floridabuilder2 who sports a top 99.61 member rating. A member since August 2007, floridabuilder2 currently has 45 active picks on CAPS out of more than 1,600 stock picks made. Achieving 75% accuracy, floridabuilder2 has attracted a whopping 983 "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
floridabuilder2 delved into the financial sector over the past few weeks with a sentiment that was only slightly more bullish than it was negative. This All-Star suggests a bank like Umpqua Holdings has a 25% internal rate of return while the "FDIC assumes losses up to 95% once you get through the first tranche of losses." floridabuilder2 thinks Umpqua will eventually beat those odds, though other banks may not.

With a portfolio highly concentrated in commercial real estate (CRE), Synovus Financial has danced on the ledge as the industry trembled and analysts expected it to topple, dragging the broader economy down with it. So far that hasn't happened, and Synovus was able to narrow its losses as loan losses improved. Some, including Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), have gone so far as to suggest the CRE train wreck is behind us.

Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC), which acquired its hefty exposure to the CRE market when it bought Wachovia, also experienced a decline in its provision for loan losses, but it experienced a jump in net charge-offs to $5.4 billion with almost all of the increase coming from its commercial real estate segment. And Wells was one of the profitable banks. I wouldn't discard just yet the nostrum that the worst of the commercial real estate market collapse is still to come.

CAPS member WPThatcher admits Synovus is troubled, but thinks it is on its way to recovery, while Teacherman1 is hoping for a buyout:

Not in this very heavy and may take my profit and wait for a better day. There are rumors of a possible buyout, and that could give them a good boost, but are still very speculative at this point.

Although 82% of the CAPS members ranking Synovus believe it will beat the market, that hasn't translated into a robust CAPS rating, which dropped from a middling three stars down to just two. You can join the members on the Synovus CAPS page to let us know if you think it's similarly situated for a rebound or will crumble with the rest of the CRE market.

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?