As a former HS boys basketball coach and current fan of the Ohio State (many times) offensively challenged men's basketball team, I understand the importance of playing excellent defense if you want to win games. Obviously, the same principal applies to investing in the stock market as NOT losing (in my opinion)is one of the most important factors in being successful.

As many of you know, March 9th, 2009 was the low close for the S&P 500 at 676.53 with an intra-day low of 666.79. Much is being made on CNBC of the "Mark Haines bottom call". But, I just don't remember Haines saying anything about a peak back in 2007.

At the moment the SPX is at 1871.34 as I am writing this. So, without dividends, the S&P is up approx 176.61% for the past five years.......this of course assumes that an investor had the psychological and gastrointestinal strength to remain in the market during the financial crisis, and then ride the benchmark index back up to today's current level. The "buy and hold" & "I'm a long term investor" guys I hear on CNBC and Bloomberg every day never seem to address how unlikely it is that most individual investors would be able to lose more than 50% from the 2007 S&P peak value, and still be able to "hang in there". No one seems to be discussing today that the S&P's overall return going back to the 2007 fall peak is actually less than 20%.

Looking at the historical (hypothetical) Spy Pro trades dating back to 11-1-07 I started with a hypoothetical balance of $10,000. The 200% leveraged RUT funds that I like to trade would now have a hypothetical balance of $1,900,415.20 (no value placed on time spent in cash). Using unleveraged funds would be up roughly half of that overall gain. And......we all would have been in the market far less time than the buy and hold guys....and probably have slept much better along the way.

On the 3-9-09 low, the Spy Pro signal was down -1.87% YTD for 2009 using the 200% RUT funds. On a buy and hold basis the 200% Long fund was off -54.27% on that same day.