On February 13, 2009, I wrote an essay called, "Another Day at the Races." I had developed a technique of buying or shorting fast moving stocks in fast moving strategies, so I detailed how I tracked the performance of nine strategies, five bullish and four bearish, from the market's Open at 9:30 AM to its Close at 4:00 PM. In my mind, it was like going to a racetrack and watching the horses run. It was great fun and often quite profitable, so we created the VectorVest RealTime Derby.

The VectorVest RealTime Derby tracks and displays the performance of over 175 VectorVest Strategies from the time the market opens to the time it closes. With this tool, I could easily see which strategies or stocks I wanted to trade on any given day. Not only that, but I could see internal market action like never before. Take today, for example: I could easily see that the opening rally of the major indexes wasn't going to last because the Derby showed Bearish strategies out-performing Bullish strategies. Sure enough, the major indexes turned lower shortly after 10:00 AM.

With the Derby providing a tremendous amount of valuable data each day, we now needed a way of storing and analyzing it. So our developers created the Tote Board. We are very proud to announce that the Tote Board is being released today to all VectorVest RealTime Derby Users at no extra charge.

Like the Tote Board at your favorite track, the VectorVest RealTime Tote Board stores the daily Derby results and provides useful statistical information on performance. Over a time period of your choice, it shows the total gain or loss of every strategy, the percentages of the winning days and trades, and the maximum draw down. This information makes it extremely easy, of course, to see which strategies have been the best or worst performers over the time period you selected.

As I look at the Tote Board right now, 2:32 PM, the best performing strategy over the last five days is Odd Fellows Short with a gain of 8.57%. It's made money in four of the last five days, which is tops for any strategy, and it's had 68% winning trades, which is second best. It also was listed as a Top-Five Performer in Tuesday's Color Guard, and it's already up 4.1% today. Should I go short with this strategy? I just might do that. Thanks guys for The Derby and The Tote Board.

PROTECTING PROFITS.
The Price of the VectorVest Composite has gone up 61.4% from the March 9th low to yesterday's close. If you have been fortunate enough to participate in this rally, you should realize it's not going to last forever. Even if you may not wish to sell any stocks right now, you should learn how to protect profits. Mr. Steve Chappell, our Director of Educational Services, will share his knowledge and experience in how to perform this delicate task. So join Mr. Chappell at the VectorVest University to see this week's "Strategy of the Week" presentation: "Protecting Profits."

We went long in the YBR portfolio yesterday with selections from the "Explosive GRT & EPS Stocks" Strategy. The VectorVest RealTime Derby made the decision to pick this strategy as simple as pie.

The "Explosive GRT & EPS Stocks" portfolio clearly had the highest performance rating of the strategies recommended in Wednesday night's Views. We calculate a portfolio's performance rating by multiplying the percent winners times the percent gain. Since the RealTime Derby calculates the percent winners and the percent gain on a tick by tick basis and delivers the results on a second per second basis, we were able to make our decision quickly and easily.

If you are not using VectorVest RealTime, you can obtain a close approximation of a portfolio's real-time performance by using our Portfolio Tracker, which is free. Another option would be to use Yahoo!Finance. In this case you'd have to manually build a WatchList of the stocks from each strategy and check them when the major indexes all gain more than 1%. This event happened yesterday at 10:09 AM, so we jumped in.

Now we are faced with the task of managing the portfolio. You may recall that the original exit strategy for a long YBR portfolio was to sell any stock that had achieved a 50% gain or a 30% loss. Stocks that were sold from the portfolio were not replaced. In real life, I found that I could not handle using a 30% Stop, so I began to use tighter Stops. I finally settled on using Stops that were 10% below the higher of the purchase price or the highest closing price attained thereafter. This seemed to work quite well, but I don't know if it gave the best results as far as risk vs. reward goes.

Even though I did some investigative work on this issue, I asked Mr. Glenn Tompkins to look into it more thoroughly. My ultimate goal is to get the maximum profit at the minimum risk. I'm sure that Mr. Tompkins will be able to help me find the sweet spot in Managing the Yellow Brick Road Portfolio.

OK, OK, we went long yesterday even after talking about planning for a downturn four weeks ago and preparing to go short just last Friday. So what happened?

As Bernie Lo, the affable host of Bloomberg's Asia Confidential TV show, said the other day, "The market looked like it was going to hell hand over fist just a couple of days ago, and now everything is going up." Yup, I was there watching Bernie last Sunday night and everything was going, uh down. Asian markets were crashing and U.S. Futures were down, big time. His guests were bearish and even some of Bloomberg's experts were expressing fears of a serious downturn. But it hasn't happened so far. Why?

U.S. Futures were still going down early Monday morning when a guest on CNBC's Squawk Box Show, Ms. Meredith Whitney, America's leading bank analyst, issued a Buy recommendation on Goldman Sachs and said nice things about banks in general. U.S. Stock Futures prices immediately took off and the Mighty Dow soared 185.16 points for its single biggest gain in a month. Of course, I watched this in utter amazement, and didn't go short in the Yellow Brick Road (YBR) portfolio as I had prepared to.

Trading was wishy-washy on Tuesday, so I thought the "Whitney" rally was over, and it was. But stock prices did rise modestly on Tuesday and the Primary Wave went from Dn to Up. So we advised Prudent Investors to get their shopping lists ready, Aggressive Investors and Traders to play the market up or down as it developed, and we decided to wait for a DnDn situation to reappear before considering going short in the YBR portfolio. Tuesday was clearly an inflection day and I needed to see whether the bulls or the bears were going to prevail on Wednesday.

There was only one problem. Tuesday's business wasn't quite completed at 4:00PM. After the market had closed, Intel reported stronger than expected revenue and profit margins for the second quarter and its CEO, Mr. Paul Otellini, presented a bullish outlook for the rest of the year. INTC jumped $1.19 per share and U.S. Stock Futures soared.

The market gapped higher at Wednesday's open and I couldn't do anything in the Model Portfolio but close my positions as soon as I could. That, however, doesn't mean you couldn't have made some very good trades. On Tuesday evening, Mr. Don Thornton, one of our bright, young Product Support Specialists, gave an excellent analysis of Tuesday's market action in his Daily Color Guard Report and he observed that all five of the top performing Strategies were Bottom Fishing, low RT, strategies. He also noted that three of the top five performers on Monday were Bottom Fishing Strategies. So he suggested that, "if you do want to play the market to the upside tomorrow, Bottom Fishing, low RT, stocks should lead the way." Boy, did they. The results were incredible.

As far as the Model Portfolio is concerned, we went long yesterday with Blyar's Bottom-Feeders/BMB. But it wasn't until 3:40PM that we got the signal to do so. I was watching a real-time graph of the Price of the VectorVest Composite most of the day, and I could see the market start to rally around 1:45PM. Later I learned that bullish comments by super bear, Mr. Nouriel Roubini, gave stocks prices the kick they needed to trigger the afternoon rally.

VectorVest RealTime made it very easy to decide which Strategy to select for the Model Portfolio. I had been watching the V V RealTime Derby and Blyar's Bottom Feeders/BMB was leading the pack most of the day. At one point it was up as much as 12.9%. However, it was up only 4.22% with 60% winners when we made our decision to go with it. The V V Derby is such a wonderful tool. It performs real-time Quick Tests on 176 ten-stock portfolios and displays the results so you can see exactly what's going on at all times. Along with the gain/loss performance of each portfolio from the prior day's close or the current day's open, it displays the stocks in each portfolio and the pricing data and gain/loss percentage of each stock. A mini performance graph is also displayed with the portfolio data. Fantastic!

Even though the Mighty Dow had made an incredible gain of 565.30 points in its four day run, the Price of the VectorVest Composite was still 25 cents per share below its June 11th's close of $20.33 per share. So the downturn hasn't been wiped-out just yet. But it is interesting to note that it took 20 trading days from June 11th to get last Friday's C/Dn signal. The reason is that the Price of the VectorVest Composite spent more days going up than it did going down. From June 11th through yesterday, the Price of the VectorVest Composite experienced 11 down days and 13 up days. Now that's what I call A Reluctant Downturn.

VectorVest is pleased to announce the introduction of a new video presentation called "The Daily Color Guard Report." This report will provide a concise analysis of the stock market's daily activity as seen through the eyes of the Color Guard. It will also provide guidance for various investment styles, along with a report of the day's five biggest winners from the VectorVest RealTime Derby.

The Daily Color Guard Report may be accessed by clicking on a button which will appear beginning June 1, 2009 on the home page of VectorVest U.S. and related products. It should be available by 8:00 pm EST, Monday through Thursday. The traditional Market Timing presentation will continue to be available at the VectorVest University each Friday. So go where the action is: The Daily Color Guard Report.

DERBY READY STRATEGIES.
As if VectorVest RealTime weren't exciting enough, the VectorVest RealTime Derby is going to be a blast. This tool may well revolutionize real time trading. It runs dozens of strategies either at the previous day's close or the current day's open, (it's your choice), creates mini-portfolios of the top ten stocks from each strategy; then tracks each portfolio's performance from the current day's opening bell. Watching these portfolios break out at the open and perform during the day is akin to going to a Race Track. That's why we call it the VectorVest RealTime Derby.

In developing this incredible tool, we have learned that very low-priced stocks, low-volume stocks and/or Pink Sheet stocks often appear in the midst of things, and we don't think it's a good idea to trade them in real time. THEREFORE WE ARE REVISING MANY OF OUR EXISTING STRATEGIES TO EXCLUDE STOCKS LESS THAN $1.00 PER SHARE, STOCKS WITH AVGVOL LESS THAN 100000 AND/OR PINK SHEET STOCKS. ALL LONG STRATEGIES WILL BE AJUSTED TO EXCLUDE CONTRA ETF's.

In other words, all the portfolios used in the VectorVest RealTime Derby will have stocks that are equal to or greater than $1.00 per share, AvgVol equal to or greater than 100,000 shares per day and not traded on the Pink Sheet exchange. Long portfolios will not contain any Contra ETF's. This is made possible by using only Derby Ready Strategies.