• They use 40-70% less electricity according to the LED City Project.
• On average they burn up to 70,000 hours as compared to a life span of only 20,000 hours with more traditional incandescent or fluorescent bulbs.
• They put-off less heat and therefore a building's air conditioning system can provide cooling more efficiently while using less electricity.

1. There are likely to be changed far less often.
2. Traditional flourescent bulbs contain mercury and are treated as hazardous waste when it comes time to get rid of them. LED bulbs contain no mercury and are thus friendlier to the environment and hazardous disposal fees don't apply.

The two companies that Jon Najarian recommended for a bullish play on the future of LED lighting are Philips Electronics (PHG) and Cree, Inc. (CREE). To show that the market is catching on to the up-side possibilities, PHG and CREE both recently broke above their 50 day moving average.

If you have a preference to support American companies, Cree is based in North Carolina while Philips is based in Amsterdam. A recent press release by Cree highlights an upcoming project that will see 4,200 of their LED light fixtures installed in a section of the Pentagon that is undergoing renovation.

It's official. The best performing stock in the S&P 500 for the year 2008 is none other than Family Dollar Stores (FDO), one of the simplest, and lowest cost retailers in the country with just over 6,600 stores.

FDO was up 38% for the year 2008.

Dennis Gartman suggested this week a strategy to go long the infrastructure sector (specifically the steel industry) while shorting the overall stock market. See the video here. I like most of Dennis Gartman's ideas and this one is no exception. The logic is that with Obama's promise to spend up to a trillion dollars on roads, bridges, schools and general infrastructure building, together with a likely agreeable congress, it's as much of a sure thing as we will see next year.

More reasons to be bullish on the steel industry:

David Eckstein is my favorite baseball player. At 5'-7", the Arizona Diamondback shortstop is one of those methodical hitters who just wear down pitchers by going deep in the count, fouling off balls, and getting base-hits by hitting shots just over the head of second basemen and just beyond the reach of short-stops or sometimes bunting. He only had two home-runs the entire 2008 season but his on-base percentage was one of the best in the league.

I've been thinking of a strategy for writing deep in-the-money covered calls on the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) that reminds me of the way David Eckstein approaches hitting. Here's the idea. Buy 100 shares of SPY at around $88 as the underlying for an $8,800 investment. Use the buy-write feature that most retail brokers offer to sell a January 84 call for around $700 at the same time.

I've been thinking alot about Bespoke Investment Group's recent Seeking Alpha article on how to "Lock-In Low Gas Prices." It's an intriguing idea that I want to un-pack with a real strategy that I'm thinking about using based it.

Did you have an experience like me around the beginning of 2002? Did your boss start speaking a whole new dialect of Dilbert-esque management buzzword lingo? Did he declare "We need to be more like hedge-hogs and less like foxes" in the middle of a meeting one day? Was he talking about cave-man era contraptions like fly-wheels and doom-loops? Did he go on and on about getting the right people on the right seats in the bus? Did he stress the importance of "confronting the brutal facts"? If so, you must have had a brown-nosing colleague like I did who gave the boss a copy of Jim Collins' wildly popular management book Good to Great for Christmas just after it was published in October 2001.

The basis for the book is a gargantuan study that Mr. Collins and his team performed of 1,435 publicly traded companies. They eventually settled on 11 companies that out-performed the market by at least 3 times over a period of at least 15 years - a pretty tall order. These were the companies that supposedly went from "Good to Great".

I like Mark Riddix's recent Seeking Alpha article entitled 'Three Financial Stocks Worth Holding'. The three he suggests are Wells Fargo (WFC), JP Morgan (JPM) and Bank of America (BAC). I'm a 10+ year satisfied customer of Bank of America so I will use BAC to build on his idea.

BAC is currently trading around $16 but it has been down below $11 recently. It will probably re-test this low at some point. Here is the idea. Make sure you have at least $1,250 in your brokerage reserve account. Sell a December $12.50 put. You should get around a $50 premium for this. If BAC re-tests the lows before the 3rd Friday in December, your option contract will most likely be exercised and you will find yourself long BAC with 100 shares at $12.50. Not a bad starting point for a BAC position at all.

Here’s an idea to play a blue chip stock leveraged by two Obama initiatives likely to be pitched during his first 100 days in office. Buy 100 shares of General Electric (GE) at around $15.50 and sell a March $17.50 covered call at $1.50. By selling the covered call at $2 above the current stock price, it’s really like entering a long position on GE at only $14.

Here’s the added sweetener – General Electric’s quarterly dividend payments traditionally go ex-div in December and February. The likely pay-out will be $.31/share. By holding the shares through the 3rd Friday of March, you will meet the requirements to receive these two dividend payments. This lowers your net entry point to $13.38 per share. Until the last few weeks, GE hasn’t even been below $20 since the late 90’s.

Here’s an idea for a quick profit at the end of rough trading year. Buy 100 shares of Home Depot (HD) at around $19 and sell a January $20 covered call at $2. By selling the covered call at $1 above the current stock price, it’s really like entering a long position on Home Depot at only $17.

Here’s the added sweetener – Home Depot’s quarterly dividend goes ex-div on December 2. The declared dividend is $.22/share. By holding the shares through the 3rd Friday of January, you will meet the requirements to receive this dividend payment. This lowers your net entry point to $16.78. Until the last few weeks, HD hasn’t even been below $20 since the late 90s.