The Chinese stock market has ignored the carnage on Western stock markets, benefiting from the "Olympic Effect." In the past 11 Olympics, the host country's benchmark stock index rose an average 25% in the year before the event, two UBS analysts, Louis Shan and Edmond Huang, said in a note Thursday. In the Games year, benchmarks rose in three of the past four Olympics and gained in the year following in all four cases. "If history repeats itself, we would likely continue to see a positive stock market return for China in both 2008 and 2009," Shan and Huang said.

How does the market see the U.S. Solar vs. Chinese Solar? I constructed two indices, tracking losses between 7/19 (the record high on the DOW) to 8/16 (the recent low for the DOW). I used market cap as the weighting criterion in calculating the index return.

The U.S. solar index lost 20.46%, while the Chinese solar index lost 30.45%. Looks like Uncle Sam wins this round. Chinese solar stocks may have seen most of their downside already, providing attractive entry points if you believe that the worst is behind us.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the stocks mentioned above. I do not own a solar panel.

CSIQ  China  DSTI  ENER  ESLR  Eben Esterhuizen  FSLR  Investing Ideas/Stocks  SOLF  SPWR  STP  Solar Energy  TSL  WFR 

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