Principal Financial Group is an insurance holding company. Co. provides businesses, individuals and institutional clients a range of financial products and services through its financial services companies. Co.'s segments include: Retirement and Income Solutions, which provides products and services for retirement savings along with select products for retirement income; Principal Global Investors, which manages assets for investors by providing equity, fixed income, real estate and other alternative investments; and Principal International, which provides pension accumulation products and services, mutual funds, asset management, income annuities and life insurance accumulation products.
When researching a stock like Principal Financial Group, many investors are the most familiar with Fundamental Analysis — looking at a company's balance sheet, earnings, revenues, and what's happening in that company's underlying business. Investors who use Fundamental Analysis to identify good stocks to buy or sell can also benefit from PFG Technical Analysis to help find a good entry or exit point. Technical Analysis is blind to the fundamentals and looks only at the trading data for PFG stock — the real life supply and demand for the stock over time — and examines that data in different ways. One of these ways is called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI. This popular indicator, originally developed in the 1970's by J. Welles Wilder, looks at a 14-day moving average of a stock's gains on its up days, versus its losses on its down days. The resulting PFG RSI is a value that measures momentum, oscillating between "oversold" and "overbought" on a scale of zero to 100. A reading below 30 is viewed to be oversold, which a bullish investor could look to as a sign that the selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and look for entry point opportunities. A reading above 70 is viewed to be overbought, which could indicate that a rally in progress is starting to get crowded with buyers. If the rally has been a long one, that could be a sign that a pullback is overdue. |