If you haven’t seen it already, you must watch Friday night’s Strategy of the Week presentation. Todd Shaffer, Manager of Research, described how Sharon Conrad, a VectorVest employee, produced a 69.91% gain from January 2, 2013 to January 15, 2015 with only a 7.10% 
drawdown. Sharon’s score became the benchmark to beat in the Midas Touch Challenge contest.
Todd then went on to describe how the Third Place Winner was able to produce a sensational 134% ARR (Annualized Rate of Return) with Midas Touch stocks over the same period.
Dr. DiLiddo said in his Friday Views essay that the Midas Touch Challenge was a huge success. “We received nearly 300 submissions, most of which showed triple digit gains. There were so many excellent results and so much innovation used in the BackTests that we are planning to show you more than the three winners.”
That’s good news for VectorVest subscribers as we all get to see these trading plans and either use them as is or modify them to suit our investment goals and risk tolerance. For example, our 3rd place winner used a 50% stop loss. That may be too steep for many of our conservative and even prudent investors. So we can play with that and see if we can reduce the risk (maximum drawdown) while maintaining a solid ARR with a high winning percent.
FREE Q&A WEBINAR: I hope you will join me tomorrow (Monday) February 23 at 12:30 pm EST for our regular SOTW Q&A (Please note the NEW TIME). Register from the link in the VIEWS or click here: http://news.vectorvest.com/CA_SOTW_QA_022315_registration.html
Remember, as long as you are registered, you will receive an email with a link to the RECORDING as soon as it is available, usually later the same day. After that, the recording can be found at www.vectorvest.ca/Events in the Archived Webinar section.
Equity Curve – 3rd Place Winner, Midas Touch Challenge January 2, 2013 to January 15, 2015.
I think most prudent investors would have a difficult time accepting that 50% maximum loss parameter!! I rebuilt the EMS strategy and ran in the Canadian market using the same settings and trading rules as the US template. So how well does this Midas master plan work in Canada, here is what I found:
% Winners=45.45% Total Gain=33.57% ARR=16.50% CROR=15.29% Max DD=21.90% Score=3.87
Based on these results it appears that this trading plan leaves room for improvement to be useful in Canada. The big winners were DHM Media and Ballard Power with over 100% ROI, but its the losers that provide some insight into a possible Canadian adjustment. Of the bottom five worst trades 3 were International Petroleum stocks and one Mining stock all tripping stop losses at or near 50% loss!!
Following Jake’s Patent Winners for guidance I filtered out the Petroleum and Mining sectors which will eliminate those volatile, commodity price driven sectors. The results using the revised trading plan are:
% Winners=43.57% Total Gain=55.87% ARR=27.47% CROR=24.38% Max DD=21.23% Score=13.74
I also tried lowering the minimum trading volume requirement, but it didn’t make much difference in the trading plan performance. Perhaps other Canadian users have been able to find a way to make the EMS search perform better north of the border? Hopefully the 2nd and 1st place Challenge winners will show more promise when applied to the Canadian markets. Regardless, the competition is a great way to encourage people to get innovative and share their successes with the VectorVest community!