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.