Before the Call: Coca-Cola Cools

For four years running, Inside Value newsletter recommendation Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) has never failed to wow the Street with its earnings results, beating estimates left and right. Will tomorrow mark the end of the winning streak, or the beginning of year five?

After the news comes out, we'll have time aplenty to dissect it. But in these few hours before we begin obsessing over Coke's short-term progress, let's take a moment to review what investors think about it as a long-term investment. Our tool in this endeavor: Motley Fool CAPS, where we poll more than 60,000 investors for their views on well over 4,000 companies, Coke among them. Here's what Fools have to say about it.

Up or down?
More than 1,300 investors have submitted ratings on Coca-Cola, making it the 59th most-rated stock in all of CAPS-land. Their verdict: "Is this really it?"

Nine out of 10 CAPS investors expect Coke to outperform the market. And although our very best investors, the CAPS All-Stars, are more optimistic at 94% approval, the stock still gets just three stars out of a possible five on CAPS.

Among its CAPS peers, Coke looks a little flat with a middle-of-the-pack four-star rating:

Wall Street vs. Main Street
Wall Street begs to differ. All 10 of the analysts we track expect it to outperform the market. So far, so good -- over the last 52 weeks, the stock has outperformed the S&P 500 by a couple of percentage points.

Bull pitch
Top-rated CAPS player TMFEldrehad makes his pitch short and sweet: "When the hands-down premier brand on the entire planet can be had for only a very slight earnings premium relative to the market, this Fool is more than willing to take a sip."

Bear pitch
Yet bears see multiple reasons for Coke's multiple to contract, fretting over the "bottled water fad" coming to an end, blaming "carbonated sugar water" for the obesity epidemic (endemic?) in the U.S., and calling the stock itself "fat" and "sleepy."

Who said that?
To learn the identities of the wise Fools who penned these words, and to explore the plethora of additional financial data we've put together on the company, just click here.

Find out why Coca-Cola is an Inside Value recommendation -- and see which other stocks made the cut -- with a 30-day free trial of the newsletter.

Fool contributor Rich Smith does not own shares of any company named above. You can find him on CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handle TMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 701 out of more than 60,000 raters. The Fool has a disclosure policy.