It seems to be working

I put a lot of money into this one so the 2.2% in 10 days was well worth it

I've had a couple of good days despite the market being weak. I am continuing to take profits. For the first time in my life I am using automatic limit sales. Yesterday I came home to find the stockbroker (Selftrade) had netted me profits of £700 and the shares sold (TATE and TALK) had pulled back from the peak . I have now put limit sales on all my wave trades. And I have opened new trades in SDL and SGC. SDL has risen by 1.2% since I bought it at lunch time.

Let's hope this one works

My initial reaction to this strategy the profits were poor. A friend pointed out that I had been holding the shares for days and the percent gains made in those days were exceptional. Looked at that way the strategy does seem to be working. (2% in 10 trading days works out at about 50% per year, if you can keep it up).

You may remember how it works. I look for shares that are trending and are sitting at the bottom of the 1,5 standard deviation confidence line. I am now tweaking the strategy. I only working with the shares where the distance back to the middle of the channel is at least 4%. I am also favouring shares where the trend is upward. Rather than going for a large number of shares with small investments in each I am putting more money in fewer shares.

US shares bought using this strategy have been sluggish so far.

I am working hard to find good VectorVest strategies for the UK. It is proving a long and tedious search because it cannot be automated. I found one search which perform well consistently through last year's troubles. It picks out shares in rising sectors that have a good fundamentals. The selections made were mostly in the mining sector ANTO KAZ LMI MIDD and XTA. My plan is to hold them for a month and then to refresh the portfolio. The shares are already making some headway.

My life has been blighted in the last couple of days. Someone hacked into my Skype account and made a whole bunch of phone calls, mostly to Africa. The sum of money I lost was not great and Skype seems to have put most of it back. But I needed to find out if my computer had been compromised. A scan revealed that some infections had slipped past the firewall. I called the security company (ESET) and they assured me that nothing really bad was sitting there and the hack must have occurred at Skype's end. ESET spent half an hour doing a thorough clean of my computer through a remote link. Nevertheless I thought it sensible to change all my passwords. Another tedious task.