3 Hot Tips From a Proven Winner

If Warren Buffett jumped off a cliff, would you follow him blindly?

Of course you wouldn't, but it does make perfect sense to take in the investment strategies of a proven winner like Buffett. You could certainly do a lot worse than following in the footsteps of a winner.

On Motley Fool CAPS, there is an ample supply of winning investors who are sharing entire portfolios with the world. Today, I'm looking at all-star CAPS member ultralong, who rarely makes a false market move. Currently ranked No. 19 out of over 70,000 CAPS members, ultralong has never closed a CAPS position for a negative score, with a pick accuracy that is an unbelievable 77.3% among 300 recommendations. Nobody is right all the time, but this player comes close.

What's going on here?
Most of ultralong's big CAPS scores have come from correct bets on highly leveraged exchange-traded funds in various sectors. That includes a timely bullish call on the Direxion Daily Financial Bull 3X (NYSE: FAS) fund just as the banking sector bottomed out last spring, alongside several "underperform" calls on Ultrashort funds and other bearish instruments at the same time.

But that's looking in the rearview mirror -- what I want to know is how this proven master investor would invest now. So here's a handful of ultralong's latest CAPS picks:

Remember the old adage about jumping off a cliff? The same thing applies here: Just because ultralong says a stock will or won't beat the market doesn't make it so. Rather than taking this as a buy-or-sell list, let's look a bit deeper as a starting point for your own research.

Why WiMax?
After a disappointing earnings report, wireless broadband provider Alvarion looks like a deep value play. The stock trades at $2.70 but ultralong believes that it should climb back to the $4 level again for a 48% return in a year or less.

Alvarion has been a Rule Breakers recommendation for two years, but that pick was made when WiMax looked like a contender for next-generation networking dominance. You can grab a free trial membership and see how David Gardner's analyst team feels about this stock now.

In my opinion, the rebound could very well take longer than that. The company specializes in WiMax installations, and that high-speed wireless networking standard is falling out of favor as telecoms worldwide take a closer look at the competing LTE technology -- even North American WiMax holdout Clearwire (Nasdaq: CLWR) is thinking about jumping to the LTE camp. Meanwhile, competing WiMax providers like Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) could grab whatever business Alvarion has left. So while Alvarion's management cuts payroll and retrenches for a better position when the WiMax market heats up again, I'm not so sure it will ever happen. This one could end up in your loss column, ultralong.

A patented winner
Myriad Genetics is another one of ultralong's value grabs after a string of bad news. In Myriad's case, I agree. The stock is currently depressed by a legal setback and the surrounding fallout, but the company has plenty of patents to lean on and is heading for higher courts to protect its mainstay genetic diagnostics business. With his nerves set to "jump," Mr. Market overreacted to a merely bland earnings report.

Like fellow medical pioneer Intuitive Surgical (Nasdaq: ISRG), Myriad doesn't have any real competition -- and won't until its framework of protective patents expire or get struck down. Worst case scenario, that will take years. Myriad will be back.

A short-term shocker
And then, there's Netflix. This market darling has made a lot of money for a lot of investors lately, including me -- but ultralong thinks that Netflix is overvalued by about 20% and placed a short-term "underperform" rating on the stock.

Sorry, but I don't play the short-term prediction game like that. You have to predict where the market will go next, and then where Netflix will land in relation to that. Over a period of years, I'm fine with that. Three months at a time, not so much.

Netflix has already established itself as a serious player in the emerging digital media market, and we ain't seen nothin' yet. Could you get a better buy-in price by waiting a few months while the stock cools down? Perhaps -- but you could also miss out on prices Netflix never revisits again. I'm a firm believer in Netflix as a business and as a long-term investment -- the short-term gyrations of the market be damned.

What do we do now?
There are hundreds more stock picks on ultralong's roster, and then hundreds of other top-notch investors sharing their secrets on CAPS. I suggest that you grab a free CAPS account and dive in on your own. Find your own favorite CAPS members, copy the best strategies, and add your own special sauce -- and maybe next time, I'll write about following in your footsteps.