My guess is that they have a lot more information that a chart trader. They probably have a better pulse on supply/demand and were under the impression that it was a smart move. Lets face it, if that was the case an executive isn't going to come out and say that! He will just say hedge mumbo jumbo because only people like Leroy and other futures market players will laugh at it. The average shareholder will just accept it because hedging is a very important tool for commodities dependent companies like Peets. Its easy for this type of move he detailed to go wrong though, all the coffee countries are trying to act like OPEC since they can't even pay their production costs right now. They all say they are destroying their worst 20% of the crop and blah blah blah, but obviously they need about 40% destroyed and they need to stick to it. These are almost exclusively very poor countries though so sticking to quotas is almost certainly not going to happen, especially with the dollar endlessly strengthening on them. Since coffee is traded almost exclusively in dollars, even to non-dollar countries like Japan, the coffee producers are afraid the dollar will eventually drop and they will make a lot less money so they are trying to take advantage of it now. However, that means everyone is coming to market with export beans in a worldwide recession. Coffee is a luxury that most people can easily cut down on so its high supply, low demand...a recipe for price disaster. At least that is my economic view of it. I usually avoid reading charts, it just confuses me with the traders supply/demand versus the theoretical supply demand that exists in the consuming marketplace.