Technically, a bear market kicks in when a given market falls below 20% from its high. So depending on which index you look at, we're already there. As of last night, the Dow Jones is down 14.5%, the Russell 2000 index down 20% and the Nasdaq, 10% off the beginning of the year. 

The question for us is, where are we with alternative energy stocks?

Here's my existing list of Global Alternative Energy Indices - which I suspect is not complete. Email me if you have some others you think I should know about . . . I do read and act on them (thanks by the way, to the person who told me about Arise Technologies Corporation - stock now being added).

Well, I'm going to start with an American index, the Wilder Hill  Clean  Energy Index, because it's still the best known. It's down 24.57% since it's peak on December 26th last year, or about where it was a month earlier in November. So that suggest for its own components, a bear market.

Now back to the global indices. They are quite hard to get data on, as it's usually a premium paid-for service, but here are the ones I have from freely available data.

The Dax Global Alternative Energy Index - see here - again, it peaked in late December at 218.25 and closed last night at 186.44 - so it's down 14.58%. No bear market here then.

The Renixx Renewable Energy Industrial  Index World - see here - hard to read, but the chart suggests a fall from over 1900 to 1400, that's a pretty severe pasting, at least 25% off it's peak.

So I hope that puts you a little bit more in the picture as several newspapers and websites in recent days have been running stories about alternative energy stocks showing big falls.

Let's put this in context.

The important point about the alternative energy sector is that  it has not been driven by Greenspan's cheap credit boom. The drivers to date have been the high price of oil, government regulations and targets, concerns over energy security and the environment and improving technology.

And as far as I can see, none of these have changed in the last month and nor are they about to. But the caveat is that you would have to expect market inflows to drop off substantially during this period of uncertainty for the world economy, because there's less investment money to go around.