A BIGresearch survey found the percentage of adult holiday shoppers planning to buy furniture or home accessories edged up for a third year in a row, to 20%. And 21% said they'd like to receive home furnishings as gifts.Trade groups forecast full-year sales of home furnishings to rise about 7% to nearly $95 billion. That would be the best in three years, but still below the record $112.9 billion in 2006.Women shop at a Williams-Sonoma store in New York City. Home furnishing retailers, both high and low end, have seen a recovery in demand this year.... View Enlarged ImageStores like Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) and Williams-Sonoma (WSM) have hammered out specific territories within that market.Custom furniture maker Ethan Allen Interiors (ETH), a classic bellwether for the home furnishings industry, saw profits peak in 2006, followed by two years of losses. [Read the full article]

Kirby Corp. (KEX) is enjoying the trickle-down effect of low natural gas prices — all the way down the Mississippi River.With more than 800 barges working waterways, Kirby is the largest tank barge company in the U.S., owning about a third of the fleet.The price of natural gas, which is used as a raw material for petrochemical products, is near historic lows. One big reason: new supply from unconventional shale fields, where fracturing technology is used to tap into source rock deep underground.The surge in petrochemical production means more business for tank barges. [Read the full article]

Companies planning an IPO are lining up for their usual race to market before the holiday break. And this year, energy is playing a prominent role.Five oil and gas companies have set terms recently, signaling an imminent IPO. Most are master limited partnerships, some newly formed. But Laredo Petroleum is an honest-to-God operating company ramping up production in the Permian Basin.The Basin is America's traditional oil mother lode, sprawling across West Texas and eastern New Mexico. Up until the last decade, it was presumed to be too mature to provide much growth.But new horizontal drilling techniques have made the area hot again. [Read the full article]

That, in turn, has made it easier for drillers to extract fuel from U.S. reserves — no small thing, considering this country's desire to lessen its dependence on foreign sources of gas and oil.One of the beneficiaries of this trend is C&J Energy Services (CJES), which provides hydraulic fracturing, coiled tubing and pressure pumping services to a variety of customers.The company, which went public over the summer, specializes in complex hydraulic fracturing projects that let oil and gas firms use horizontal drilling techniques rather than traditional vertical drilling techniques.Because of recent advances in fracturing technologies, drillers can now access hard-to-reach deposits in a cost-effective way. That's a change from a few years ago when it didn't make financial sense to go after these deposits.More than half of U.S. [Read the full article]