NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Remember The Bad News Bears? Movie about a plucky team of misfits nobody believes in that, through a series of lucky flukes, makes it to the big game and prevails.

A similar flick is playing on Wall Street these days -- call it The Bad News Bulls. A ragtag band of stocks that -- despite historically steep valuations, a still-soft economy and an uncertain global environment -- somehow manages to keep pulling off upsets.

Week after week people talk about how it's just another sucker's rally; week after week the market ticks higher. Even after its recent jog down the Dow Jones industrial average is 16 percent above its October low. The Nasdaq, 30 percent.

Wall Street's grouches think it doesn't make sense. Merrill Lynch strategist Rich Bernstein lowered his recommended stock allocation from 50 percent to 45 percent on Tuesday -- the lowest allocation level any strategist has had in nearly three years. "Perhaps the main reason we are lowering our equity allocation is that the equity market still appears to us to be highly speculative," he wrote. "Such speculation is typically indicative of the end of a market cycle, and not the beginning of a bull market."

As one of the few strategists who was appropriately bullish until the bull market ran into its latter stages, and then appropriately bearish as it ran into speculative excess, and then crashed, Bernstein isn't somebody to ignore. Stocks' latest move could be yet another suckers' rally, ultimately leaving investors who put their faith in it sorrier and broker than before.

But that doesn't mean we can't head higher still. Even bearish sorts think there's enough juice left in the market to push stocks higher.

"I don't think there's going to be enough bad news in December to send us lower," said Brett Gallagher, head of U.S. equities at Julius Baer. "My guess is we go up through the end of December and we meet our day of reckoning sometime in the new year."

December has traditionally been a good month for the market: In the last 52 years the Dow has lost ground only 14 times. Gallagher also suspects that many mutual fund managers have been throwing money at the market lately -- particularly its riskier areas, like techs and telcos -- in an attempt to improve on their miserable performance this year. Such gamesmanship could continue, especially as it forces more conservative managers, worried about keeping their relative positions, into the fray.

Institutionally, Wall Street has a good reason to aid and abet the rally through the end of the year. January is the month individual investors, flush with bonus money and hopes for the new year, pour money into the market. The more money they pour in, the better it is for everyone in the business. If enough money floods in, stocks could go even higher still.

But not everyone thinks that's in the cards. Individual investors have been burnt too badly, are too worried about job prospects in an uncertain economy, and already have too high a percentage of their assets in stocks, thinks J.P. Morgan equity strategist Carlos Asilis. "Whether retail money is going to rotate back into the market in a huge way is the key," said Asilis. "My guess is it's not going to happen."

With fuel running out and another tough earnings season, Asilis reckons the market will have turned by the end of January. His target for the S&P 500 for the end of next year is 800 -- 13 percent below where it is now.

Not everyone is sure that a flood of new cash into mutual funds is a necessary component of the rally continuing for even longer. For Bank of America Securities strategist Tom McManus it's enough that the huge outflows of the summer -- a record $52.61 billion exited stock funds in July -- have been replaced in recent weeks by incremental inflows.

"The market doesn't need money to go up," he said. "The only thing that has to happen is the pace of bad news has to slow."

McManus thinks that a lot of people have made investment decisions based the opinion that things are going to be worse than they will be. As it unfolds that the environment isn't quite as lousy as they expected, stocks will keep heading higher.

The perfect example of how this works, points out Bollinger Capital Management head John Bollinger, is the holiday shopping season. Just a month ago there were people forecasting the worst year in decades. As it's become clear that people are still going to buy presents for their kids, retail stocks have put on a big rally.

"We're set up for an environment where most of the surprises will be positive, and that will be good for equities," he said. "I think that the rally will continue through at least the first half of next year. Then expectations will be more in line with reality and people will have to reassess."

That reassessment might not be pretty, however. Bollinger thinks the market will chop wildly until earnings have improved to the point where valuations look normal, or even cheap. He points out that after the Dow first hit 1,000 in 1966 there was 16 years of up and down action, with plenty of false dawns where investors lost tons of money, before stocks were a decent long-term investment again.