Service Corporation International (SCI)

Company

"Service Corporation International, headquartered in Houston, Texas, owns and operates funeral service locations and cemeteries. Service Corporation International has an extensive network of businesses, including 1,053 funeral service locations and 354 cemeteries in North America as of March 31, 2006." (company website)

Buy

5-Jul-06. SCI has been in a long downtrend for the past year (sidebar) with the possibility of a double-bottom in March and June. The encouraging sign is that the 50-day moving average has stabilized. The thing is, everybody has to die, so these guys are in the right business.

• Price momentum (PPO) — picking up
• Trend (ADX) — weak; there's a lot of up and down in the chart
• Money flow (CMF) — still flowing in, but just
• Relative strength (RSI) — holding at neutral
• Volume — in past month there have been more higher-volume up-days than down-days (1)

Sell

31-Jul-06. I gave up on SCI today, even though there are some signs of improvement in the chart. It has been following the lower Bollinger band down for a week and a half, and each time it looks like there might be life in the stock, it disappoints again the next day. What tipped the scales, I guess, was that Market Edge identified SCI last Friday as a short candidate. That's not a comforting development when you're long.