This week might be a great week for long term investors in the solar industry. I'm not talking about the performance of individual stocks (with a few exceptions, they were pretty bad), I'm talking about the potential occurence of a bottom.

This potential "bottom" would be a great signal for long term investors that the worst is behind us and the future might be as green as the energy they believe in.

The retailing sector is taking the lead in making adjustments for the current financial crisis. Because selling goods is such a hand-to-mouth business, often financed by manufacturers of whatever is being sold, the storekeepers are quick to react to a crisis.

Belgium's Delhaize Le Lion, a powerful supermarket chain, has simply stopped selling products from Unilever pending a price cut from the Anglo-Dutch firm, according to today's Wall Street Journal.

I took time off from the supposedly off-the-record gloom at the Merrill Lynch Banking & Financial Services Investor Conference, at which John Thain called the present crisis a repeat of 1929, to hop west to Dow Jones’ offices to learn about their new international index: the Global Dow. It is nearly as quirky as the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

As the DJ newswire has blared out to the world, the index is not capitalization weighted. So Chinese solar power producer Suntech (STP) is carried at the same weight in the index as Exxon (XOM). STP is one of a trio of Chinese stocks in the new index, along with two banks.