On December 3, 2004, I wrote an essay called, “VectorVest Simple.” Its purpose was to illustrate how easy it was to pick winners by looking at high VST stocks in Stock Viewer. In that essay, I showed that 14 of the top 20 VST stocks had gone up from June 4, 2004 to December 2, 2004. That was very good, but I wanted to do better. So I described how I use graphs to cherry-pick my choices. Our subscribers loved it.

Well, it’s been a long time since I wrote that essay and a lot of things have changed. Fortunately, they changed for the better. While it’s still a good idea to cherry-pick winners from high VST stocks, we can now pick winning stocks from the Sure-Fired Success Wizard and you don’t have to be a cherry-picker to do it. Here’s all you need to do:

1. Check your portfolio to see if you should exit any positions. You need to know how much buying power you’re going to have before adding any new positions.

2. Check the Wizard. This is a wonderful tool, which tells you whether the market is Bullish, Bearish or Neutral, what stocks or Contra ETFs to buy or what stocks to sell short. It also recommends exit criteria for you to use.

If you are a compulsive cherry-picker, you may wish to look at graphs of the stocks the Wizard has presented. As I wrote in 2004, a stock’s price pattern is a reflection of its personality. I like to buy stocks with smooth, rising price patterns, because they will continue to rise unless impacted by a negative factor. If a stock has an erratic, unpredictable price pattern, it’s a speculation and I wouldn’t touch it.

At market bottoms, I’m much less picky about price patterns because the low RT, low VST stocks returned by our Bottom Fishing searches usually explode in price for huge profits. If the Wizard is Bearish, I tend to go with the stocks in the order returned by the search. In other words, I let the sort dictate my choices.

3. If you have time, you may wish to go through the same cherry-picking process for the top 10 VST stocks shown in Stock Viewer and/or the stocks returned by the searches shown as Derby Winners in the Views. It’s not unusual to see the same stocks appear in several searches. I like that and would tend to favor them.

Going through steps 1 through 3 doesn’t take very long, so you can do it at night or before the market opens in the morning. Although the SFS Trading Systems are based upon trading at the next day’s Open, I still like to check the market’s direction before making any trades.

I do this by watching the stock futures before the market opens. If they’re up, I expect the market to open to the upside. When the market opens, I’ll go right to my portfolio to see if anything unusual has happened. Then I’ll go to the Home Page of VV7 RealTime for a quick read of market direction. Next I’ll check our Market Timing Graph, set on Intraday, 1 minute bars, best fit. If at 10:00 AM the market is still trending as I expected it to, I’ll start making my trades.

None of this takes very long and you don’t have to duplicate the Sure-Fire Success Model Portfolios to start making money. Make it easy on yourself. Let the Wizard be Your Guide.

What you should do next…

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