The VAT setup was designed to take advantage of explosive moves that change and/or accelerate the trend in a stock's price action that can be exploited with online stock trading and stock option trading. This technique was inspired by a similar method detailed in Victor Sperandeo's work as written in his book, "Trader Vic II: Principles of Professional Speculation". The VAT setup can be implemented with either the stock itself or stock options depending on your preference. To use the setup for stock trading or stock option trading you will need to be able to determine whether the market is in a confirmed rally, to select the stocks with strong fundamentals and price action, have access to stock charts, know how to draw a trendline, utilize Bollinger Bands, spot gaps or laps in a stock's price action, and have a trading plan once a trade is entered.

My preferred method of confirming a market rally in the general market or indices is the one developed by William O'Neil, founder of Investor's Business Daily and author of the book "How to Make Money in Stocks". In O'Neil's method, one looks for a Follow Thru Day or FTD after a market decline. When the market shows a rally equal or greater than one percent of that particular index with greater volume than the previous trading day then that marks Point 1 or Ground Zero as I call it. Once that occurs then ideally you want to see the same type of rally again at one percent or greater on higher volume than the previous day within 4 trading days. This day is the FTD and confirms the market is set to rally.

You must then have a list of stocks that are high in price volatility as well as possess strong earnings along with low debt. For online stock and option trading, you will watch these stocks daily on your stock charts to review their performance while watching for certain types of price patterns which I will detail later. On your charts, you must have a technical indicator called Bollinger Bands on the screen. These bands measure the fluctuation of volatility in a stock's price action. If the bands are expanding then that shows that price is accelerating in a particular direction. If the bands are constricting or the ends of the bands are turning outward then it indicates low volatility as price action becomes constricted.

By developing this list, you can watch for any explosive price action in any of the stocks that is bullish which results in a gap in price or a lap in price. A gap results when a stock opens higher than the previous day's high but still within the previous day's high of that day while a lap (which is the most powerful pattern of the two, in my opinion) results in a opening above the previous day's high of the day and never comes down within that previous day's price action. Once a gap or lap occurs, it must break an established downward or flat trendline on the stock as well as reach the upper Bollinger Band. This shows that there has been a strong price reversal and momentum is showing.

Apple recently resulted in a 75% gain in just this past year for the author of this article using the VAT setup and, presently, RIMM has just triggered a VAT trade as well while the market has been in confirmed rally at the date of this writing. Stocks such as Apple Computer, Google, Goldman Sachs, Blue Nile, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and many others have all offered up VAT setups in the past which have resulted in huge returns to stock and option traders that were watching for this type of trade.

This is a powerful trading method of getting in early on stocks that are fixing to make huge gains in price which can be exploited with either the stock or, for greater leverage, with stock option trading. These stock moves are explosive and make accelerated gains very quickly. Take the time to build a "hit list" of high performing stocks and watch for these types of trades and you will be rewarded handsomely.