On April 29th I wrote an essay on bottom fishing and I have written six essays on the subject since then. I didn't write that April 29th essay by accident. I had already noted a week earlier that the market was drastically oversold as indicated by an extremely low (<0.20) Buy/Sell Ratio. Clearly, it was a time to prepare to go bottom fishing. Three trading days later, May 4th, we got a Green Light from the Color Guard and it was time to buy stocks.

In the essay cited above, I described a method of finding high RS stocks at bargain prices and also suggested that Prudent investors consider using "Biggest Bargains" and "Turnaround Candidates," found in the Strategies - Prudent Group of UniSearch. The six essays written over the succeeding weeks addressed the use of 26-week lows, recommendation sequences, Industry Groups, hot growth stocks, RT crossovers and MA crossovers. Had you implemented any of these strategies, you would have made money.

One of the interesting things I observed in working with these strategies was that the stocks they find do not fare well when the market starts going down. I thought about it and, in retrospect, this makes sense. The stocks found by bottom fishing strategies were beaten down in price for a reason. What ever that reason was is not important. Bottom fishing is a matter of dealing with damaged goods. These stocks don't have the support to fight a market trend. Since it appears that the market has topped, our bottom fishing days should be over for now.

Now is the time to be thinking about strategies that are mirror images of bottom fishing strategies. Instead of finding stocks to buy that are coming off of recent lows we have to be looking for stocks to sell-short that are falling from recent highs. As with the bottom fishing strategies, there are a lot of ways to do this with VectorVest. In this week's "Strategy of the Week," we're illustrating a search in which we look at Industry Groups whose Prices have gone up for three consecutive weeks and we sell-short the stocks ranked highest by RT. I know this sounds counter intuitive, but so was bottom fishing.

So put your fishing rod away and grab your shot-gun. We're going from Bottom fishing to Duck-Hunting.