The delivery of the words varies — first a whisper, lately practically a roar — but the message throughout Wall Street is basically the same: The market is on fire, and stock prices have nowhere to go but up.

Friday ‘s showing (another record for the Dow) seemed to provide fresh evidence this message may well be the one to listen to for now, as the market doggedly demonstrates its ability to overcome one obstacle after another.

One veteran financial adviser, Vera Anselli, sums up the mood. “You have a slowing economy, a hot housing market turning icy, along with a subprime mortgage meltdown, high-priced oil, geopolitical tensions growing by the day, a sliding dollar, and debt at all levels running amok,” she says. “Yet, the market refuses to go down. It tells you that this market for now is unstoppable.”

It’s this thinking that has prompted Ms. Anselli, the president of San Francisco-based Anselli & Welles Financial Advisors, to push clients to reduce their cash reserves to 10% from 15% and to put the money to work in equities, about 80% in America and the remainder in overseas markets.

Unstoppable is a strong term, especially because lurking on the investment road is a potentially significant land mine, namely sharply contracting earnings growth that could well be evident in first-quarter profit reports. That, of course, conjures up the possibility of a bevy of earnings disappointments, invariably a trigger for falling stock prices.

Despite some strong and better than expected first-period reports, such as in the case of Honeywell and Caterpillar, the overall numbers suggest current investor adherence to an overwhelmingly sunny up-up-andaway market view could well be suspect. It’s all laid out in a hardeyed and disturbing look at prospective earnings by the chief investment strategist for Standard & Poor’s, Sam Stovall, in the latest issue of S&P’s weekly Outlook newsletter.

His thrust: The earnings tear of recent years is over. Between the second quarter of 2002 and the third period of 2006, the S&P 500 posted 18 straight quarters of double-digit increases in yearover-year operating earnings. In last year’s fourth quarter, however, earnings growth slowed to an 8.9% rise.

It’s expected to go even more downhill. A little more than three months ago, S&P was projecting an 8.2% rise in first-quarter earnings. However, owing to elevated oil prices and a slowing economy, S&P’s forecast for the period has tumbled to 3.2%, with eight of the 10 sectors of the S&P 500 hit by reductions in estimates. For the full year, earnings projections have been knocked down, to 6.6% from 9.8%.

Mr. Stovall acknowledges that S&P’s 6.6% outlook is hardly written in stone. He notes that it hinges on an S&P forecast — which some economists believe is outlandishly high — of 15% earning growth in this year’s fourth quarter. Without that 15% gain, he says, “we may be lucky to see a full-year rise beyond 4%, since we are looking for advances of only 3.2%, 5.8%, and 2.7% for the first three quarters.”

Okay, who are the good guys and the bad guys on the earnings front among the 10 S&P 500 sectors?

Energy is one of the chief culprits. The greatest erosion in S&P’s first-quarter earnings estimates during the first three months of the year is seen in the energy sector, whose 16.5% projected increase has been adjusted downward to a rise of just 3.3%. This largely reflects an expected 18% drop in oil and gas storage and transportation earnings and a 29% decline in oil and gas exploration and production. Further, the integrated oil and gas group, which represents 62% of the energy sector’s market value, is now expected to register just a 4.7% first-period earnings rise. For the full year, energy is pegged to run in the red, with a 2.9% loss.

The biggest first-quarter loser among the sectors is expected to be consumer discretionary, with a 20.6% loss, while telecom services are rated no. 1, with a 30.5% profit gain. For all of 2007, the earnings parade is led by estimated gains of 26.7% for telecom services, 17% for health care, and 15.9% for information technology.

While lower than expected earnings invariably add up to lower stock prices, S&P doesn’t think that will be the scenario in 2007. Its investment policy committee, he says, believes 2007 earnings growth will be sufficient to support its forecast that the S&P 500 will eke out a 6.4% gain this year, to 1,510 from its 2006 close of 1,418.

The bottom line: Watch out for land mines.

dandordan@aol.com