Scared of the roller-coaster stock market? Don’t be. This is the wrong time to be a wimp and the right time to be a buyer.

That’s the clear word from corporate America, which has gone on a buying binge, betting billions daily that the direction of stock prices is up. While the bulls and bears heatedly debate where the stock market is headed, corporate America is flashing an unmistakable message that it believes the bevy of concerns that abound on Wall Street – the course of the economy, earnings, interest rates, or international issues – are overdone.

Right or wrong, it’s literally screaming that now is the time to scoop up stocks, and significantly, it’s putting its money where its mouth is.

Liquidity tracker Charles Biderman, president of Trim Tabs Investment Research of Santa Rosa, Calif., has the story. Over the past two weeks, corporate America has been shrinking the trading float of stocks at the fastest pace he’s ever recorded. Further, over the past month, corporate buying, via stock buybacks and cash acquisitions of companies, has exceeded corporate selling by roughly $2 billion a day.

To Mr. Biderman, whose well-regarded research is aimed at institutional investors, the implication is clear – namely, that even if inflows into American stocks stay low,” corporate America is pumping ample cash into the stock market casino to send stock prices much, much higher.” And that’s precisely what he sees, he tells me – about a 20% rise between now and the end of the year.

His enthusiasm is largely based on the following liquidity numbers:

* New stock buybacks are averaging $2.2 billion a day, and the number of new announcements has pushed buybacks to a 2005 high.

* New cash takeovers have surged to $1.2 billion daily, the highest in four weeks.

* The new offering calendar (a source of additional stock supply) remains on a spring break – only $250 million a day. What’s more, April’s $7 billion in new offerings is the lowest monthly output since August 2002.

* Insider sales over the past four weeks have slowed to $550 million daily.

* Likewise, our liquidity tracker points to strong growth in wages and salaries – 7.5% over the past three weeks – suggesting, he believes, that corporate America will remain a massive net buyer of stocks.

Noteworthy to Mr. Biderman is the stock market’s strong performance following each of the two previous periods in which corporate America also shrunk the trading float of equities big time – after September 11, 2001, and July 2002. “People were giving away stocks on both these occasions, while corporate America stood there and said, We’ll take all you’ve got,” he recalled. “Obviously,” he added, “corporate America is saying once again it sees fantastic values at current prices.”

If that’s so, why was the market so weak in the first half of April, a period in which the Dow plummeted to 10,087 from 10,504? Most observers attribute it to fears of an economic slowdown. Not so Mr. Biderman, who ascribes that decline primarily to heavy stock sales designed to help meet the April 15 taxpaying deadline. He notes, for example, that this year in April, Americans had to ante up $142 billion to pay their income taxes, up from $106 billion a year ago. So they had to sell a lot of stock to pay their taxes, which unquestionably put a damper on the market, he said.

How would he play the market? Mr. Biderman, a one-time Barron’s reporter, is gung-ho on technology, which, he notes, everyone hates. “You want to buy growth in a growing economy, and that’s what tech is all about,” he said. In this context, he favors a trio of Internet stocks, each of which he personally owns. They are Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com. He also likes Nasdaq 100 index tracking shares, which trade under the symbol QQQQ and are down about 12% this year.

Most Americans know that the weak dollar means higher prices abroad for the overseas traveler. Our liquidity expert knows it firsthand. Just back from a business trip to London, Mr. Biderman gripes that he spent the most money there he has ever forked out in his life for a breakfast, $61, for orange juice, a bowl of fruit, an omelet, whole wheat toast and coffee. “And it wasn’t even a fancy place,” he said.