Thursday, October 19, 2006

I'm just experimenting here on loading charts. The chart is from MetaStock's program. I use a screen capture (HyperSnap, which is a great program for my use).

The stock is Herman Miller, a top 3 furniture manufacturer. Notice that they had a torpedic advance. There was also a 15% short position at the time of their earnings announcement.

Having spent 10 years in the furniture business (at a dealer for HM), I have painful professional experience that commercial furniture always gets kicked in the stomach first when there's a recession. When no political or economic figure was talking recession in 1990/1991 my organization saw it's backlog decrease. Trust me that it is no fun sitting down with your banker and talking about recessionary pressures affecting your business when NO ONE else is speaking the "R" word. The response? No one is calling for a recession (meaning, you must really suck at your business to have this far a fall off). "They" finally did call a recession, and it cost the nation a president's re-election and me a bank loan. The good news was I lost the 10 lbs that all women claim to want to lose, and I was awarded a set of steel balls from one of the owners for my leadership during that time. Unless we have some aberration, we'll use Steelcase and Herman Miller as bellweathers for the economy. I'll do a weekly chart on their stock prices and post any useful news. We'll see what develops. We'll have a recession watch.

Oh well.....I don't have any technical mumbo jumbo to offer on this, but all of the momentum indicators are moving down in the upper chart. I've not worked with these indicators much. I don't claim to be a technician nor do I play one on TV, but I'm a student of it--a stinking amateur. Here's another look using the default format that I like to use.

I'm toying with shorting this stock. I'll post what I decide to do. So far, being short in this market has been painful. More in the oft promised mea culpa post. I'm generating testicular fortitude for that post, and I'm not quite ready--maybe a testosterone shot will help.

This chart tells me that HM is overbought. We'll see what happens next week.

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