Southern is a holding company. Through its subsidiaries, Alabama Power Company, Georgia Power Company, and Mississippi Power Company, each of which is an operating public utility company, Co. provides electric service to retail customers in three Southeastern states in addition to wholesale customers in the Southeast. Co. also owns Southern Company Gas, which is an energy services holding company whose primary business is the distribution of natural gas in four states, Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and Tennessee, through the natural gas distribution utilities. Southern Company Gas is also involved in several other businesses that are complementary to the distribution of natural gas.
When researching a stock like Southern, 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 SO 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 SO 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 SO 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. |