I'm "TMFCrow"

Edit: To change CAPS username.

I am 'zirotti'.

Noone else is on CAPS?

"MaxCap88"

My CAPS user name is "scimonoce" (economics spelled backwards).

What does everyone think of CAPS so far?

Geoff,

I was addicted for about a month. Strange. I was really shooting for the "100/100" charm and lost interest once I achieved it. CAPS seems to reward many picks and relatively short time horizon- so I am unsure as to its ultimate utility to a value investor. Perhaps I'm just bitter do to a couple of bad shorts; I went from the top 96% to the bottom 45%. LOL.

-Nick

Nick,

"CAPS seems to reward many picks and relatively short time horizon- so I am unsure as to its ultimate utility to a value investor." – That would be bad for me, I don't like making more than about a dozen picks, and I don't think I'd ever make calls with less than a three year time frame. Even when there's no money involved, that's just not how I think. So, I hope CAPS isn't too terribly biased to many picks and short time horizons – accuracy is important, but conviction (and hence concentration) is the biggest difference between great investors and mere mortals.

I noticed a lot of the accounts seem to be inactive. However, I was surprised at the contrarian nature of the rankings at least for some of the stocks on which I made my "thumbs up" / "thumbs down" calls back in October.

In other words, I was surprised how much the CAPS ranking system agreed with the twelve picks I made on 10/04/06:

I made six thumbs up calls (all calls were for 3 years): BTH, EXM, FRK, HBI, STRT, and JAKK.

And six thumbs down calls: OATS, GLW, YORW, WFMI, MON, and ERTS.

So far on Blyth I've been very wrong (down 14.45% vs. S&P up 8.40%) and CAPS has been right with a 1 star ranking.

My other "thumbs up" picks get five stars (EXM and JAKK), four stars (FRK and HBI), or no rating (STRT).

While none of my "thumbs down" picks got five stars. MON and GLW get 4 stars, WFMI and ERTS get 3, YORW gets 2, and OATS gets 1.

Overall, I'd say that's a more value oriented assessment than I expected from this kind of user generated system. But, you really won't be able to tell until much more time passes.

Looking over these twelve calls just now I realized that they happened to have a lot of new about them this week – Florida Rock (FRK) is being bought (so I guess I'll end the call on that one up 80.94%) and then of course two of my "thumbs downs" are getting hitched – OATS and WFMI. That will hurt my results – and I had been doing so well on the negative call on WFMI (down about 25% while the S&P was up a bit).

Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing about other people's experiences with CAPS and their thoughts on it so far.

Is that the CAPS at Motley Fool? I think I understand it to be analysts picks. I don't like to follow the herd or listen to analysts because so many of them IN GENERAL change their opinion on companies based on the stupidest things that have nothing to do with the fundamental economics of the business.

Its not professional analyst just regular guys and gals giving their thumbs up and their thumbs down. There are quite a few bright minds using the service as well as the duds, just like the market.

Hello:
I am snash02 on CAPS as well as here.
Have not earned my CAPS rating. Really don't see the point, relative to value investing. Best case is to use CAPS as a source of leads for deeper analysis and thorough research. I do not see any other connection to value investing. Probably, I will never do a CAPS rec because the concept of buying/selling based on ranking and consensus is just speculation disguised as investing. But yeah, I will continue to read CAPS.

Also, it occurs to me that there are some speculators disguised as CAPS "investors", whose objective is to Pump up their favorite stock etc. On one of the other TMF boards there has been a lot of talk on the "popcorn" and how to time the market after a TMF recommendation. Some of the same user names appear in CAPs and on the other boards where market timeing is discussed. More evidence that CAPS is inconsistent with the value investing mind set.

regards
snash02

I've become somewhat annoyed with CAPS. More geared towards swing and day traders, than long-term investors.

Wax (he posts here regularly) is featured today on CAPS because of his 20+ average pick rating.

I received an e-mail from a fellow caps user to inform me that my profile had gone dormant since I'd made no new picks in 90 days. Anyway I updated few picks and I noticed that most of you were dormant too! LOL!

I've been super busy enhancing Value Investing News, so CAPS has kind of been a low priority. I haven't figured out how filling in CAPS ratings helps me.