Our team at the Calgary Financial Forum had a ball last week playing the "The Birthday Game." They won virtually every time, especially with the Canadian stocks.

You may recall from last week's essay that "The Birthday Game" is one in which we ask a visitor to our booth for the month and day on which they were born. We then use that information to select the top ten stocks ranked by VST descending from Stock Viewer a year ago. Our bet is that this portfolio of stocks went up in price from the selection date to the current time. If the portfolio didn't make money, the visitor won a prize. Based upon my experience, I said last week that we won about 80% of the time. Well, I was too modest.

We ran a series of tests last week in which we started on Friday, June 2, 1995 and advanced the starting date each subsequent Friday, creating 544 unique 10 stock portfolios. Using Quick Test, we found that these portfolios made money 95% of the time. Does this sound too good to be true? Prove it to yourself. Simply select any Friday you want and use Quick Test to see how the top 10 stocks in Stock Viewer performed to the current date. Chances are that the portfolio went up in price. The average gain for these 544 portfolios was 80.9%, and the average annual rate of return was 21.0%.

Is there something magic about a ten stock portfolio? No, not at all. We also tested 5, 15 and 20 stock portfolios. The results were remarkably similar. As far as the performance of individual stocks is concerned, an average of 66% of the stocks went up. So what do we have here? We have a way of picking a portfolio of stocks which is highly likely to appreciate in value with very little effort. But it just can't be that easy. Everybody knows that we all would feel guilty if we didn't work like dogs trying to pick good stocks. And even if we did use VectorVest to make a portfolio of the top 10 stocks, we'd need to be in there watching it like a hawk, wouldn't we?

Not according to what I've seen. I've been running high VST performance tests for over fifteen years now and I'm still amazed by what they show. Read my essay called, "The Test of Time," in the March 15, 2002 edition of the Views. In it, I tell how the four portfolios of the top ten VST stocks in the March, 1992 issues of the VectorVest Stock Advisory each gained over 600% in ten years. That's not bad, but there's a lot more to using high VST stocks than the simple buy and hold strategy indicated above.

I had run some of these variations a long time ago and found the results to be very interesting. Those studies took a lot of time and effort to conduct, so I got away from them. We have some new tools to work with now, so I intend to show you a whole lot more about making money with High VST Stocks.