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.