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Vector Vest review (www.vectorvest.com)


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Vector Vest review (www.vectorvest.com)

  #11 (permalink)
 
Big Mike's Avatar
 Big Mike 
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Holding because it's bullish would be a hindsight bias.

Can you comment on portfolio level trading of dozens of products, what kinds of tools are available to analyze and manage in a portfolio?

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  #12 (permalink)
 dstrader 
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Just continuing some test with the SPY.

Now, let's see what happens if we try their second 'slowest signal', the Green Light Buyer. This will create many more signals than the "Confirmed Calls". Therefore more prone to whipsaws.



Now, your $100K is worth $145K (CROR of 12.55%). Therefore, it actually did better than the "Confirmed Calls"

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  #13 (permalink)
 dstrader 
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I just wanted to put one more test with the SPY with their latest created (and fastest) signal, the RTX Kicker.

These are the results.



As you can see your $100K would be worth $137K (CROR of 10.61%). Max drawdown of 11.39%. Slightly worse than the GLB (Green Light Buyer) signals.

Of course, there are a million combinations possible. We could try a target and a trailing stop for each signal for example. Or use a ETF 3x for longs, ETF -3x for shorts, etc... etc...

If you would like to backtest a specific portfolio or system let me know. I will try to post as time permits.

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  #14 (permalink)
 dstrader 
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Big Mike View Post
Holding because it's bullish would be a hindsight bias.

Can you comment on portfolio level trading of dozens of products, what kinds of tools are available to analyze and manage in a portfolio?

Sent from my phone


They have 5 main canned portfolios depending on the style of investor you are: prudent, conservative, aggressive or speculative. Besides that, they constantly have competitions, so subscribers can submit their own created custom portfolios. I've seen some very good ones from the past, but they don't seem to be as good as you increase the time horizon (curve fitting?). I was a bit annoyed that for the last competition they established just a year period, so as I recreated some of the submitted portfolios I realize that members created optimized portfolios for that period, as I increased the period for 3 years or 5 years they were not that great. I would expect VV to know better, and establish a competition with broader rules.

It's a shame that they don't have a subscriber forum to exchange ideas. Ideas are exchanged via in-person user group meetings. So, a user group in Chicago, may not know what a user group in NYC or Dallas is doing which is not the best way to exchange ideas. A universal forum with people's exchanging ideas on each other's portfolios would be much much better, and I told them that during my call (what are they afraid of? seems silly that in this day and age they depend on these in-person meetings). Anyway, I plan to attend the next one in Lake Geneva and hopefully will learn a lot from long term users.

As far as analyzing custom portfolios, they have all kinds of searches (possibly few hundred) and in itself is overwhelming. Some examples of search groups (they have 20 -30 searches on each group): Cherry picking, ETFs, Hi-Lo Searches Industries/Sectors/Stocks, Protrader (technical searches), Candlesticks, Price-volume, Prudent, Retirement, Speculative, Trends (Bottom fishing, crossovers, divergences, etc.), etc. etc.

With any of these searches, or any combination of these (e.g you may want to go long on a certain couple of searches, and short on others), you can create your portfolio, backtest, and create several reports (transactions, summary report, etc.).

They have a tool called Watchdog, which I found interesting. Let's say you have a group of Midas Touch (these are their gold picks) stocks that you want to buy once a MACD (or any other indicator of course) cross above the signal line, and you just want stocks with price above $5 and Avg Volume >= 250K, then you can set up a 'watchdog' that will alert you via email or txt message when that situation happens.

The other key portfolio capability is called Genius. Once you created a portfolio, it will have a copy of that portfolio in your database (Joe's retirement portfolio for example with his 10 initial positions). Once you turn on the Genius, Joe's portfolio will be managed automatically. For example, Joe's portfolio has a rule to sell at 50% target, so AAPL is sold and a new stock is bought according to his portfolio rules (e.g. stock with greatest VST). Any change in the portfolio will send you an alert, so you can make the change in your real life investment portfolio with your broker. If you want this executed automatically, you need to have an account with Tradeking. Otherwise, as I said, you just have a 'picture' of your managed portfolio in VV, and you manage manually on your broker.

There are other things, but again, I'm in a learning curve myself. I will report as I learn more. The think I like so far is how quick and easily you can test an idea. They don't have a script language, so programmers here are out of luck, if they want to use an indicator that is not in their software (I find this to be a weakness as I can program, most people may not care).
Another thing I find interesting is that it's easy to create these searches and portfolios based on market timing and basic fundamentals. This may be possible in other platforms, but I believe it would be much more complicated and you may need to create your own 'fundamentals' type rules, and your own 'timing' rules. The fact that you can combine these two with some technical indicators quickly and build a 'trading system' seems unique to me.

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  #15 (permalink)
 dstrader 
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As I said in my previous post, they have some user proposed strategies that look quite good. One that caught my attention is using leveraged ETFs. In this case the VV user uses 3x ETFs to go long/short according to GLB (Green Light Buyers) signals. From 2010 to 2013 (more specifically from around April 2010 when those ETFs were created to mid May 2013 - so slightly more than 3 years) someone using this strategy would have made 1MM dollars with a $100K investment. I'm sharing this here, because I saw a public webinar showing this strategy, so I should be ok.

The strategy works like this: you go long SOXL(Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shs) with a 5% trailing stop when you have a GLB signal up, and you go long SOXS (Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bear 3X Shs) with a 4% trailing stop when you have a GLB neutral signal. Test period: 12/31/2009 - 05/16/2013. Results:



Just amazing right? you just made a $100K investment capital into $1MM in just 3 years with a manageable but somewhat painful 20% drawdown. That is a CROR of almost 100%!

Ok... I rebuilt the strategy on VV and I changed the period to trade from the beginning of 2010 to today (Feb 23 2015). Let's see what we get:




The final results are still pretty good, but look at the May 2013 to May 2014 period, you would have to go through an almost 50% drawdown!. Is this realistic? Not many people would have the guts to keep trading during those conditions. The fact that they chose such a perfect period (although the strategy and the video was around mid 2013) was a bit questionable to me, and that's why I decided to run to 'today's' date.

Anyway, this seems worth further research. Just want to share this with the group. Any comments welcomed!

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  #16 (permalink)
 
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 CMPMD 
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dstrader, I am interested in VectorVest too, and appreciate you starting an continuing to post to this thread. I'm planning to attend one of their meetings this Saturday in Orlando, and learn more about them. Thanks again for sharing your DD about them.

I come from a long line of people who convinced others to sleep with them.
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  #17 (permalink)
 dstrader 
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CMPMD View Post
dstrader, I am interested in VectorVest too, and appreciate you starting an continuing to post to this thread. I'm planning to attend one of their meetings this Saturday in Orlando, and learn more about them. Thanks again for sharing your DD about them.

Thanks. I recommend you to go to one of their user group meetings. The closest one from Orlando is in Tampa. I went to the one near my current location in Lake Geneva. It was quite good and had over 100 people. I believe it's a serious company which is rare in this business, and I decided to sign up for a year to get a bit more experience with the tool. It's no holy grail for sure, but it's easy to use and can help you pick up some good stocks.

Let me know if you have questions.

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  #18 (permalink)
 
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 deaddog 
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@dstrader

Any comments after using Vectorvest for a few months?

I recently signed up for a 2 month free trial compliments of my broker. I like he software so far, it's been a week trying to figure it out.

I'm hoping it will be a useful tool for screening stock. So far it is the best I have found for looking at Canadian Stocks. I have found that you have to check the data with a different source after you have selected any stock. So far I have only found a couple errors but it would be nice to have confidence in the software. I notified Vectorvest of the errors and they have taken steps to correct them.

Any hints on how a technically challenged, computer illiterate, old fart might easily master screening and back testing? I would like to come up with my own strategy and be able to back test it.

"The days when I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days" RW Hubbard
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  #19 (permalink)
 dstrader 
Chicago, USA
 
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I actually like the software quite a bit. So much, that I signed up for the yearly renewal. Said that, if you look at my previous posts, it's definitely not the holy grail, but as you said, it does help you to select some good stocks. Also, I do feel they are one of the few honest business in this area after so many disappointments. Their webinars are good (if you haven't been attending them), and their customer service is excellent. It's not that cheap, so you better make good use of it to justify the cost (~ $1500/year for real time).

I've been doing well selling puts mainly from the Great Growth Stocks portfolio (sometimes Safe and Sound). Basically, these are stocks that I wouldn't mind buying, so I'm just trying to decrease the 'cost basis' as I build my portfolio. I sell puts on 10 to 20 positions on stocks that I want to buy and on the price I want to buy (strike price - premium). Few can be assigned and then you own them, the others I just pocket the premium. Of course, you need to be well capitalized or have a good margin account and know options well (sell puts with high IV, cost basis at good support levels, etc.). I particularly like the CI indicator that allows me to list the stocks that are mostly with 'well behaved' charts (price goes from left bottom corner to top right corner as VV says).

If you are technically challenged I recommend you use the 'canned portfolios'. They seem to be the best. I've been trying several others, but if you change the time frames they don't perform as well as the 'canned portfolios'(Great Growth Stocks, Safe and Sound, etc.).

Make sure you attend the user groups (UGs) and webinars. It's a great way to exchange ideas and learn how to better use the software. Most people in the UGs seem to be retirees so I don't think most are that comfortable with technology but they can still use the software successfully (I hope I'm not being politically incorrect here... ). I actually think that VV is really easy to use after the initial few weeks (but I'm not technically challenged at all, I actually love technology). Not sure where you are, but I attended a couple of user group meetings at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin and they have a very good crowd. The hotel they meet is very nice and I took advantage to enjoy the weekend with my 6yo/wife . In addition, not sure if VV do this for everybody, but they sent me 5 CD's (which I haven't watched yet) when I signed up for the software. It's a 2 day course on how to use the software, seems to cover VV very well.

I'm super busy currently, but as time allows I will try to put here some other strategies and backtests.

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  #20 (permalink)
 ziggy123 
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dstrader View Post
As I said in my previous post, they have some user proposed strategies that look quite good. One that caught my attention is using leveraged ETFs. In this case the VV user uses 3x ETFs to go long/short according to GLB (Green Light Buyers) signals. From 2010 to 2013 (more specifically from around April 2010 when those ETFs were created to mid May 2013 - so slightly more than 3 years) someone using this strategy would have made 1MM dollars with a $100K investment. I'm sharing this here, because I saw a public webinar showing this strategy, so I should be ok.

The strategy works like this: you go long SOXL(Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shs) with a 5% trailing stop when you have a GLB signal up, and you go long SOXS (Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bear 3X Shs) with a 4% trailing stop when you have a GLB neutral signal. Test period: 12/31/2009 - 05/16/2013. Results:



Just amazing right? you just made a $100K investment capital into $1MM in just 3 years with a manageable but somewhat painful 20% drawdown. That is a CROR of almost 100%!

Ok... I rebuilt the strategy on VV and I changed the period to trade from the beginning of 2010 to today (Feb 23 2015). Let's see what we get:




The final results are still pretty good, but look at the May 2013 to May 2014 period, you would have to go through an almost 50% drawdown!. Is this realistic? Not many people would have the guts to keep trading during those conditions. The fact that they chose such a perfect period (although the strategy and the video was around mid 2013) was a bit questionable to me, and that's why I decided to run to 'today's' date.

Anyway, this seems worth further research. Just want to share this with the group. Any comments welcomed!


Unfortunatley - you would NOT be making money with 3X ETF over a 3 year period as ther is an issue with these instruments since its based on options and "management fee" - there is some major "deterioration - if you hold more than a few weeks and volatility is high you will most likely be LOSING money!

Just my 2c

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