Smart and Final (SMF)

Company. "Smart & Final is a warehouse grocery chain which operates over 235 stores in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Florida, and northern Mexico. The Company also operates two foodservice distribution businesses located in northern California and Florida." (company website) Personally, I've always thought the company was misnamed; Smart and Final sounds more like a mark-down clothing store than a grocery store.

Buy. I bought SMF about three days too early. The price had peaked and the day I bought was the second down-day in a row. That, of course, is easy to see after the chart is complete. At the time, I was thinking that it had already pulled back on 28-Jul and SMF was back on the up-trend.

The solid leap upward a few days later was gratifying to see.

Sell. There is a fairly distinct pattern in SMF price action: it goes up in big leaps, retreats in little steps, followed by another big leap upward. This game of leapfrog had resulted in nearly $2 per share gains by the beginning of this week. There was a lot of room to ride out a short-term dip, but two down-days in a row, with increasing volume, made me nervous.

Although I think SMF will continue to rise for a while (the trend is still strong with an ADX value near 40 and +DI much higher than -DI), I decided to protect my gains at $1.75 per share.

There has been very little trading in SMF today. At the time I sold, only 9,000 shares had changed hands, and more than 10% of them were mine! I think I lucked out on this one...