L.A. writes a piece weekly for TheStreet.com and this week he took a look at a consumer name - JM Smucker The article is reprinted here with permission.

There haven’t been many places to hide over the last two months in the stock market if you were long stocks. Few if any issues held up although some of the better performers for the past year were also lost the least over the past two months. A lot of those companies were consumer goods companies. One example is SJM Smucker Company (SJM). They have a nice operating margin, return on equity and earnings growth. There charts are stellar.

On the long term time frame, take a look at how volume has expanded each time a swing point has been surpassed confirming the trend and suggesting that it has farther to go.

If there was a problem with SJM up until recently, it was on the weekly chart where the trend was suspect bullish. That occurred back in November of ’09 when price surpassed the previous swing point but volume didn’t expand. That type of action tells us that although the push higher can continue (and they did), at some point the stock will sell back down and retest the suspect breakout. At that juncture it will regenerate or, if it really shouldn’t trade higher, volume will expand on the retest telling us that the bullish move is done on this time frame.

As we can see, the retest and regenerate area did receive a subsequent retest although it took half a year to happen. The result was that SJM regenerated and headed higher. The secondary support zone held and now the higher support zone should hold going forward.

On the daily chart, the large gap up area on heavy volume created a new support area on this time frame for SJM and the first retrace into such support is usually the best buy. In this case, that was quite true.

At this point, SJM is heading back to the highs at $63 and change. Given the volume that was left at that price point on June 18th my best take is that SJM probably won’t be able to get through that area just yet. If so, another retrace is likely and once more, the $59.50 to $60 area would be a great place to add to positions or start a new one in this name.

Thanks for listening and until next time, keep trading the charts!