Stoneridge (SRI)

Company. Stoneridge is "a leading independent designer and manufacturer of highly engineered electrical and electronic components, modules and systems for the automotive, medium- and heavy-duty truck, agricultural and off-road vehicle markets." (company website)

Buy. I bought SRI last week in a fit of optimism, seeing that it had made a strong gain on nice volume. This followed a series of higher highs and higher lows since mid-March.

Sell. SRI is generally up over the last week, the trend appears to have quite a bit of strength (black ADX line), and more money is flowing into the stock than out (CMF), but I decided this morning to sell anyway. The volumes have dropped off to practically nothing — after almost four hours of trading today, just over 7000 shares had changed hands.

I surmise that what is going on is that the rising price of oil and gasoline portends bad news for the automobile industry, and it therefore follows that this may be bad news for SRI, a supplier to the automobile industry.

In light of my disastrous track record over the past few months, I decided to err on the side of caution and sell while I still had enough gains to cover trading costs and eke out a few dollars of profit.