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 opinions 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 with how the CAPS community sees their future.

Cramer says
Right after Carol Bartz took over as CEO at Yahoo!, Cramer endorsed her as the right person to steady the ship after ex-CEO Jerry Yang's much-maligned second stint there. While Cramer acknowledged that other analysts weren't nearly as hopeful, he said she deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Whether it's the company or the CEO, things at Yahoo! haven't been going according to Cramer's plan, and he recommends staying away from the stock now.

Yeah, I am disappointed by Yahoo, I think that there is so much there... everybody uses it, it is the dominant play in Yahoo Finance... I like Carol Bartz as a person very much... but she has not delivered yet... I am on the fence on Yahoo.... I cannot think of a reason to buy it.

CAPS says
It seems too soon to jump ship already, and Fool Rick Munarriz cautioned investors early on that Bartz would need at least a few quarters before judgment could be rendered. CAPS All-Star SreeRama says the company still has a better-than-average chance of turning things around.

Brand name coupled with management that is now more focused on making the company more profitable than expanding the offerings and services. Company was more product and feature focused to date because of it's engineering background. We see signs of change, change in the right direction and right strategic moves.

On the other hand, CAPS member sempire says Yahoo! will be left in pieces.

Yahoo will be the AOL of portals. I can imagine that eventually someone will buy Yahoo, or better yet, parts of Yahoo, and just turn off all the useless pieces for good.

Eventually all the useless Internet advertising will alienate users from clicking on any ad links, and with tools like ADP, many people already don't see them. Yahoo can't charge for services because there are better free ones that everyone will go to, so what are they going to do?

This Fool says
There are plenty of reasons to think Yahoo! will be a winner from here on out. Critics have argued that it waved the white flag by outsourcing its search function to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and its Bing platform, but Yahoo! is saving millions in costs by doing so and still receives 88% of the ad revenue, at least for the first five years. There are escape clauses galore on both sides of the contract, but I wouldn't rule out an eventual buyout by Microsoft. A multiyear working relationship can go a long way toward smoothing the rough seas of a takeover.

Your say
While CAPS members may stand with 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. What do you think? Is Cramer right or off his rocker?

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.