VectorVest

Don’t waste your money; more importantly, even if you have money to burn, don’t waste your time.

When we first purchased VectorVest six months ago and began a thorough and systematic evaluation of the product, we initially believed that we could profit by taking the opposite side of the VectorVest recommendation, as our tests indicated that VectorVest’s marketing timing calls and stock ratings were wrong about 87% of the time. In other words, it appeared that VectorVest was just a parrot for what Wall Street recommends, and anyone that has traded for awhile knows that when Wall Street says buy, that means sell, and when they say sell, that means buy. Unfortunately, after a thorough analysis, we realized that all testing using the VectorVest system is invalid because the system contains bad math and bad data. Specifically, VectorVest does not properly account for stock splits, includes numerous bad prints in its data. In addition, the mathematical calculations used in the system have numerous errors.

In terms of product quality, VectorVest is severely lacking. In addition to the bad data and mathematical errors mentioned above, the program frequently crashes, has frequent “divide by zero” errors, and sometimes will simply not retrieve results. As programmers, we were able to definitively determine that all of these problems were due to poor programming practices, poor quality assurance testing, and most importantly, an arrogant attitude on the part of the support staff and a refusal by them to fix the problems. We are confident the reason for this is they sell so many copies of this flawed product that frankly, they don’t care. Moreover, they DO NOT offer refunds, so if you purchase anything other than the basic monthly data, which you can cancel but not receive a pro-rated refund on, you get no refund. In other words, they know the software has problems, therefore, they do not offer refunds.

The bottom line is after over six months of thorough and careful analysis, we conclude that regardless of whether you follow the system or take the opposite side of the trade, your results cannot be reliably predicted simply because the data the VectorVest system relies on is inaccurate. At the end of the day, any serious analysis using their product is analogous to throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal stock tables. Between failure to account for stock splits, bad prints, and a multitude of programming errors within the system, most simulations you run are statistically unreliable because the data in the VectorVest system is inaccurate. Moreover, locating and/or attempting to filter out the bad data in the VectorVest system is excruciatingly painful because the program frequently encounters “divide by zero” errors or simply crashes. You have to have a tremendous amount of patience and a cabinet full of pain killers to use the VectorVest system for more than a few days.

Don’t waste your money or your time.