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?

The Fool's free investing community, Motley Fool CAPS, aggregates the opinions of more than 125,000 members to assign ratings for each stock's likelihood of outperforming or underperforming the market. For the first 20 months after we began tracking the CAPS community's collective intelligence in late 2006, the data shows that newly minted five-star stocks offered the best opportunities for investors, while the lowest-rated companies fared the worst.

Cramming for Cramer
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
If there's one stock Jim Cramer likes it's Wal-Mart, not least because it has had excellent management in the person of retiring CEO Lee Scott. The Mad Money star says Scott deserves to be inducted into a hall of fame for great executives because of his efforts in lowering prices for consumers. Even Wal-Mart's critics admire how well it's performed in these times. Says Cramer:

It's one great stock ... it's the best-performing stock in the Dow. ... I want to buy, buy, buy. We will miss Lee Scott on this show, the CEO who reinvented Wal-Mart, and who brought lower prices to the hundreds of millions of people, and is one of the greatest CEOs ... and we ought to have a Wall of Fame for retiring CEOs who have done unbelievably, because Lee Scott would be at the top. No offense to George David at United Technologies ... So, I want you to stick with Wal-Mart ...

CAPS says
With more than 87% of the 5,000-plus CAPS members who rated Wal-Mart tagging it to outperform the market, it's likely investors there agree with Cramer's assessment. Yet it also has its detractors, like CAPS All-Star member TSIF. who thinks the company itself is a winner but suggests its suppliers may not fare as well, thus holding it back:

Looking at my picks, I'm getting awful close to getting the "yes man" bobble! While Walmart is a great recession stock and I'd go there before 0% interest T-bills, it isn't going to beat the S&P over the next year. I expect S&P to outpace most "safe stocks" based on small cap history pulling up from a recession. Go Walmart, if you can keep your suppliers [from] going bankrupt then you will do "OK"....but Fools do better than OK!

Given that Corning recently conceded defeat, it may be surprising to learn that Cramer recommends buying the LCD panel maker in a big way. But it's not for the screen side of the business that he likes it, but rather because it has a fiber optics segment that's linked to Verizon (NYSE:VZ), one of his favorite stocks. CAPS member unvrsldeflation concurs, seeing fiber optics getting a boost from the infrastructure programs under discussion by the new administration:

The death of the auto industry should be priced into this stock at this price. From here it should see a boost from the fiber optic play coming with the Obama infrastructure challenge. There ought also to be steady adoption of flat panel tvs, not the wild adoption that most business models predicted. There ought to be enough for a company that is still making money at productive activities within the 21st century economy to make more.

Your say
While CAPS members may stand with Jim Cramer or on opposite sides of the field, the investor-intelligence community is more than what some All-Stars think, even if they are TV personalities. But what do you think? Is Cramer right or off his rocker? Why not head off right now to CAPS and sound off with your thoughts on Wal-Mart, Corning, or any other stock.

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!