Dave Gresens is an executive in the automobile auction industry, which he says is a lot like buying and selling in the stock market. However, Dave gets his market inspirations from his father, who made his living as a market investor. Dave's father gave him some important advice: "Take your hobby and turn it into your profession," and that is exactly what Dave is well on his way to accomplishing.

Dave watched his father toil with pencil and pad over market fundamental analysis in the days before personal computers, and although he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps, he is happy he can now do in minutes what it took his father hours to do. Dave believes in both fundamental and technical analysis, but he doesn't want to spend the hours fundamental analysis still requires, so he applies technical analysis with NeuroShell to stocks that he has already screened "fundamentally" using the Investor's Business Daily.

Dave started out with some other software, but found that those programs didn't have the depth he felt he needed. Then he tried NeuroShell, and ironically enough, he rejected that too because he had the preconceived notion that he needed to be a much better trader to take advantage of the tremendous depth and flexibility that NeuroShell offers! After several months, though, he realized that NeuroShell would be a perfect fit for the power he needed to implement his methodologies, so he repurchased it. "It's a powerful piece of software," he told us. "I'm sorry it took almost a year to realize it".

Editor's note: We're sorry that people think they need to understand all of the power we offer before they can take advantage of a limited portion of that power, but we're glad to have Dave back. In fact, when he showed us his charts, we were amazed at how good they were after only a few weeks. Most people take much longer to get that good.

Dave's methodology is based upon Alex Elder's Triple Screen methodology, where he looks at the market through multiple time frames, in 3D so to speak. He loads up hourly, 10 minute, and 2 minute charts in NeuroShell DayTrader Professional to see if signals in all three charts are correlating. He starts by observing how the MACD is changing in the hourly chart, and filters the hourly changes through a 10 minute intermediate time frame chart where he compares stochastics to thresholds. Signals passing this screening process are timed in his 2 minute chart to make long/short decisions. He uses tight stop and limit rules to control his entries and exits.

Dave has tried his method on ETFs and indices, but feels that he makes the most money with his fundamentally screened individual stocks. Just during the month of December 2004, his model produced a 184% annualized return (this was not backtesting; in fact Dave doesn't even optimize this model). His biggest hurdle was learning to trust his model. Like most of us, he sometimes lets his emotions override the model's judgment, which usually doesn't end well.