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 opinion of more than 140,000 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 to how the CAPS community sees their future.

Cramer says:
For a stock that's more than doubled from its March lows, GPS maker Garmin has seemingly lost its way. Its smartphone finally hit the market, underwhelming users and analysts alike. Jim Cramer says that if you've made a profit in Garmin, you got lucky:

You got a double in a bad stock... you know what you do when you do that?... you ring the register... come on man, two points off of its 52 week high... a serial disappointer... let's cut it in half... take the money off of the table... and play half, take all of your capital out that you invested, and let the other half run... you are playing with the house's money... no one has ever lost that... go buy a nice sweater with what you take off the table... sweaters last.

CAPS says:
Even though 94% of the more than 5,000 CAPS members who've rated Garmin marked it to outperform, a pretty dour bunch have left comments about its prospects. TalibKweli offers a telling remark about what could have been:

The GPS system is a great product. Garmin is a great company. Unfortunately, the product got bigger than the company.

This Fool says:
I agree with TalibKweli's assessment. GPS has virtually become a commodity, and the GPS-enabled smartphone that could have distinguished Garmin from the pack arrived eighteen months late.

While the nuviphone's features hold promise, the company's execution leaves many analysts scratching their heads. Why, they wonder, did Garmin choose to offer its phone exclusively to AT&T? Why did it decide to price itself higher than the industry leader? AT&T, the second-largest wireless carrier won't allow the nuvifone to muscle in on the iPhone's position of prominence. Moreover, for much less than the price of the nuvifone, you could just install a GPS app from rival TomTom on an iPhone, and get the same basic features.

For AT&T, the nuvifone does offer the promise of additional revenue streams, with value-added services such as real-time traffic updates, weather, and movies for an additional $6 subscription. But you've got to get people to use the phone first. Right now, it seems a lot to expect that users will switch from their current devices to a nuvifone, meaning it'll take more than just another GPS device with bells and whistles to help Garmin find its way.

Your say
CAPS members may stand with Jim Cramer, or on opposite sides of the field. But our investor intelligence community is more than the opinions of a handful of All-Stars, even if they are TV personalities. What do you think? Is Cramer right, or off his rocker? No need to hedge your thoughts on CAPS -- why not head off right now to map out a position on Garmin?

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.