THE BIG GORILLAS.

I'll never forget the Fall of 1999. It was the most exhilarating experience of my investing career. I made more money, faster than I had ever done before, and so did a lot of other people. It was so easy to make money, that it was almost sinful.

1999 was a special year. As the last year of the twentieth century, it harbored the Y2K mania. Companies around the world spent billions of dollars on equipment and software to ensure operability upon the dawn of the new millennium, pushing share prices of the vendors through the roof. It was the time of the dot com boom, the Tech boom and the Biotech boom. It was a time when stocks of blue chip companies gave way to those of companies with no sales, no earnings and little chance of surviving. These turkeys soared like eagles, and they weren't for me. There was one group of stocks, however, that caught my eye. I called them "Big Gorillas." My definition of Big Gorillas was very simple. These stocks merely needed to have an average trading volume of 2,500,000 shares or more and a "B" or "H" recommendation. Sorting by VST would separate the good ones from the bad.

1999 was also the third year of The Presidential Cycle. It was expected to be a good year for the stock market. But it was pretty much of a bummer up until the end of October. The Price of the VectorVest Composite actually was down a depressing 3.3% from 12/31/98 to 10/15/99. The subject of my October 22, 1999 essay was "Golden Buying Opportunities." In that essay I said, "In this world of instant gratification, it's tough to sit around waiting to get an up signal. I believe one is coming soon, and it will be well worth the wait." Was it ever!

In the Strategy Section of the 10/22/99 Views, I said, "It looks like we may have seen the bottom of this downturn this past Monday. If you are Riding the Wave, you may begin to accumulate some selected strong stocks such as Big Gorillas, but it's too early to jump in with both feet." The following week, I said, "This is it. We nailed the bottom of the downturn and now the market is moving up. We expect this rally to take us through to the end of the year."

One of our subscribers bought the top ten Big Gorillas stocks in the NASDAQ 100 as of 10/22/99 and turned $100,000 into over a $1,000,000 by the end of the year. How did he do it? He sold his laggards and re-invested his buying power every day into his two top performing stocks, ORCL and QCOM. He sold these stocks at the end of the year and moved to Las Vegas. This technique of "rolling up" will be presented with the modern day version of the Big Gorillas as this week's "Strategy of the Week." You can also see how it's done at the VectorVest University.

You want to have fun? Own a stock that goes up 194 points in a single day. It happened to me with Qualcomm in the glory days of The Big Gorillas.