The bear is dead; long live the bull. That’s the investment mood on Wall Street, which is clearly exuberant.

“It’s scary,” Jeanette Schwarz Young, editor of the Option Queen Letter and a trader on the New York Board of Trade, says. “I’m terrified because the market is wildly bullish, and fear is nonexistent,” she tells me. “We seem to be witnessing a buying panic attack, the fear of missing out on a possible rally. Everyone,” she adds, “must be drinking egg nogs with too much rum in them. It’s as though their brains have fallen out.” Ms. Young says the current mood reminds her of the dot-com era, when it was “just buy, buy, buy because it’s up, up, and away.”

Indeed, the “overenthusiastic bullishness,” as she describes it, is leading her to warn clients – based on the uncertainties she sees surrounding interest rates, inflation, and the ongoing vigor of the economy – to beware of “a doozy of a pullback” before her outlook for a year-end wrap-up in the Dow of 11,000-plus. But that figure, she believes, won’t hold, given her expectations of “a market crash” in April.

Indicative of the overpowering bullish sentiment sweeping through Wall Street are 10 significant examples, namely:

* Major market averages have jumped 7% to 10% in the past five weeks.

* In recent weeks, individual investors have been pouring money into stock mutual funds at an accelerated rate of $4 billion to $5 billion a week.

* Foreign investors, after having snapped up $24.6 billion worth of American stocks in September, are believed to be maintaining a brisk buying pace.

* Lots of cash on the sidelines. In the last six months, the public put about $300 billion into various savings vehicles, such as CDs and money-market funds.

* Hedge funds, with assets of more than $1 trillion, are underinvested. Institutional cash reserves stand at a relatively low 4%.

* In the past month, corporate America, via $78 billion of stock buybacks and $29 billion of cash takeovers, has gobbled up $107 billion worth of American shares.

* Insider selling is subsiding.

* The mood of investment advisers, as compiled recently by Market Vane, shows 69% are bullish, the highest reading in years.

* The latest survey of the American Association of Individual Investors shows only 16% of those surveyed are bearish.

“We’re seeing a Goldilocks rally on the theory everything is perfect and the market is going higher,” Ms. Young says. “No one seems to be looking or caring about the negatives because in a lot of people’s minds they don’t exist.” Going on, Ms. Young observes, “Does anyone doubt that interest rates are going higher or that we’re in a period of rising inflation? Just look at the prices of gold, copper, and even sugar. Everyone says the economy is going to come out all right, but try telling that to the 30,000 people being laid off at GM or the 7,000 people who are going to be jobless at Merck. Let’s not forget, too,” she adds, “about those rising heating bills and the fact that salaries are not keeping pace with increasing costs for medical insurance and drugs.” And what happens, she asks, if housing, with its huge number of creative mortgages and unsold homes at an 18-year high, undergoes further declines?

“We’re looking,” she says, “you betcha, at a very stressful period ahead for the consumer.”

Then why, I asked, is she projecting a rise in the Dow to 11,000-plus? Because, she explains, of market momentum and a tax incentive from Uncle Sam to repatriate overseas profits, which will cut the tax bite on overseas earnings from 35% to 5.7%. “But that tax break,” she points out, “will be D.O.A. January 1.”

Her scenario after that: A projected crash, with the Dow at 9,200 or maybe 8,800 by April, as her concerns take on more investment weight.

But for now, Mr. Young’s concern is too many bulls, who she thinks may be full of bull.