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VectorVest . . . anyone?
- Thread starter comp652
- Start date
I lost money with the market timing signals, sold by the flashy marketing material. This guy sums it up very nicely. http://www.ripetrade.com/2011/09/vectorvest-market-timing.html
Thanks for the interesting link stockjockk. I think people are probably better off with their own customized stock screens via a program like StockVision instead of something like VectorVest where you have less control and it's easy to under-perform buy & hold.
I'm 4 weeks into the free trial. They have 4 timing systems. The slowest is called confirmed calls and is what you usually see advertised in their commercials and junk mail. There have been 77 since 1996. I put the price of the S&P 500 on each of those days into a spreadsheet. There have been 37 confirmed up calls. 19 (51.4%) have been correct. If you had bought at the close on each day of the confirmed up and sold at the close on the day of the next confirmed down, you'd have made 58.0 %. A buy and hold from beginning to end would have made 97.3% so you would have significantly underperformed the market.
If you had sold at the close on each day of the confirmed down and covered at the close on the day of the next confirmed up, you'd have lost -45.7%. Ouch. Don't use confirmed calls!
The DEW timing system seems to work better empirically but I haven't done a similar analysis.
There are over 400 canned strategies included with the program. I've tested over 100 of them and most of them lose money over the last 11 years (the lost decade), with or without timing. But there are a couple that work incredibly well and so I plan to continue using VV running those. But you have to live with some pretty big draw downs along the way so don't put all your apples into one system.
Tech support is good. They always answer after only 1 or 2 rings. But they get real defensive when I try to explain that most of their strategies don't work long term, even the Top VST Stocks strategy which is at the core of their system. They talk to me like I'm a beginner instead of the 25 years I've been building and using trading systems.
You will hear some people swear by it and others curse it out, depending mostly on whether the market was in a bull run during their evaluation period. Listen to the people who are still using it after many years.
If you had sold at the close on each day of the confirmed down and covered at the close on the day of the next confirmed up, you'd have lost -45.7%. Ouch. Don't use confirmed calls!
The DEW timing system seems to work better empirically but I haven't done a similar analysis.
There are over 400 canned strategies included with the program. I've tested over 100 of them and most of them lose money over the last 11 years (the lost decade), with or without timing. But there are a couple that work incredibly well and so I plan to continue using VV running those. But you have to live with some pretty big draw downs along the way so don't put all your apples into one system.
Tech support is good. They always answer after only 1 or 2 rings. But they get real defensive when I try to explain that most of their strategies don't work long term, even the Top VST Stocks strategy which is at the core of their system. They talk to me like I'm a beginner instead of the 25 years I've been building and using trading systems.
You will hear some people swear by it and others curse it out, depending mostly on whether the market was in a bull run during their evaluation period. Listen to the people who are still using it after many years.
GordonTheGekko
Guest
This is just me, but the commercials, web site and slogan are WAY to ratty for me. On the other hand, I'm spending $99/mo on a The Street subscription (going to cancel...).
I have been a member since 2005. I did a lot of back testing through 2007. However, in 2009, when I re-ran a long term (7-years) test I had done earlier. The results were different.
I extracted the trades from both the runs of the strategy and found that several of the companies that did not survive the financial crisis were effective removed from their historical database. I called support and they confirmed this. I also discovered that when stock symbols change names it causes and issue in their database (I think you lose the historical data of the old symbol)
Being a database programmer by trade, the only rationale I could come up for doing this would be their structure for the symbols do not have effective dates. I could not get them to confirm this.
However, with all of that, I must say they have come up with a new timing system called the "Sure Fire Success (SFS)". SFS is a long only system. They have a similar on that is long and short but you have to manually test this unless you have
I have done some testing using an $8800 account size and starting this system Jan 2001 through current (Dec. 12, 2012) and this system returned over 1,600% and this was with a commission structure of $7.95/trade and a 50% max draw down. This occurred between Nov 21, 2006 and Dec 26, 2008. That being said there was about a 273% gain (an
I think on a go-forward basis, VV is really good. I just have issues with the back testing. Their support staff is really good and many of them actually are trading using the system.
I am attaching the report that was generated using the mentioned back test of the SFS detailed above.
I extracted the trades from both the runs of the strategy and found that several of the companies that did not survive the financial crisis were effective removed from their historical database. I called support and they confirmed this. I also discovered that when stock symbols change names it causes and issue in their database (I think you lose the historical data of the old symbol)
Being a database programmer by trade, the only rationale I could come up for doing this would be their structure for the symbols do not have effective dates. I could not get them to confirm this.
However, with all of that, I must say they have come up with a new timing system called the "Sure Fire Success (SFS)". SFS is a long only system. They have a similar on that is long and short but you have to manually test this unless you have
I have done some testing using an $8800 account size and starting this system Jan 2001 through current (Dec. 12, 2012) and this system returned over 1,600% and this was with a commission structure of $7.95/trade and a 50% max draw down. This occurred between Nov 21, 2006 and Dec 26, 2008. That being said there was about a 273% gain (an
I think on a go-forward basis, VV is really good. I just have issues with the back testing. Their support staff is really good and many of them actually are trading using the system.
I am attaching the report that was generated using the mentioned back test of the SFS detailed above.