Wisdom of the sage's.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

It's often hard to separate fact from lore, and sometimes not even worth the trouble if you subscribe to that cynical wisdom among journalists that holds, "Facts have killed many a great story." So I use Joseph Kennedy here only as a starting point and with no certainty that his famous utterance about the shoeshine boy was true.

Kennedy, of course, was not only the father of an American president but also a buccaneer of a businessman who thrived in the unregulated, pre-Depression stock market. After making a fortune in that lawless frontier, he later was appointed by Franklin Roosevelt to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, under the theory that no one knew better all the ways to ravage the henhouse than the fox himself.

Those are the facts. The lore is that Kennedy cashed out of the market just prior to the crash of 1929 because he heard a shoeshine boy offering stock tips (the boot buffer allegedly suggesting "oil and rails") and concluded that when speculation was so rampant even amateurs were involved, a fall was sure to follow. True or not--Kennedy told the story himself, but who doesn't embellish a tale--the lesson was that economic shifts can sometimes be detected by means other than the

conventional.

In that spirit, and employing ol' Joe's swashbuckling approach to matters of finance, here are a handful of nontraditional indicators of my own sussing. You're a fool if you make any real investment decisions based on these. But there's a slim chance you might wish you had.

1) I added a four-pack of compact fluorescent light bulbs to my cart while shopping at the local Wal-Mart a few weeks ago, but when I got home I found that one of the bulbs had been broken while my stuff was being bagged. I returned the four-pack to the store and was surprised to see how gingerly it was treated. A subsequent Google search turned up the fact that CF bulbs contain mercury and that a broken bulb should be treated as hazardous waste. (Some Web sites even suggested wearing protective gloves when cleaning up and giving the house a thorough airing afterward.)

The Joe Kennedy Intuitive Leap: Durham-based Cree Inc.--a leader in the development of light-emitting diodes, which are sturdier than bulbs, contain no mercury and are highly efficient and long-lasting--will be poised for a huge takeoff the first time some clumsy-fingered store clerk drops a crate of CF bulbs and the business is turned over to the moon-suit crew for a week...