IPOs boost confidence but market future up for grabs. (Wall Street West).

WALL Street always has been fertile ground for opinion making, but the choppy market of the last two years is producing a bumper crop of diverse views on where stocks are heading.

Take Dan Rubin, who manages money at RIG Microcap LP in Westwood. Last week, he called for the Dow to smash through 11,000 this summer, and for the Nasdaq to reach 2,000 (the Nasdaq last week traded around 1,700).

The sunny outlook can be foretold, in part, by the blossoming Initial Public Offering market, said Rubin, who also runs an investment banking shop. 'This week there are seven IPOs coming. Can you remember the last time we had a week like this?" he asked. This year's IPOs have done well in general, with 30 percent to 40 percent gains common. "When the IPO market comes back, that always leads the stock market' Rubin said.

With a decidedly gloomier view is Chip Hanlon, who runs the Unfunds Inc. money shop in Huntington Beach. Surging state and federal deficits, along with an epic shift in investor sentiment, could foretell a generation of bearishness, Hanlon predicted.

"U.S. stock markets tend to be characterized by very long trends, such as the ursine market of 1967-82, and then the big, long bull, which ran from 1982 to 2000. "According to Dow Theory, the market moves in long, slow waves from periods of extreme over-valuation to extreme under-valuation," Hanlon said. The 1970s were the last under-valuation nadir, and the late 1990s, the last boomy top. Hanlon said the stock market likely has crested again and is into initial stages of another sustained bear wave.

Contributing columnist Benjamin Mark Cole writes about the local investment community for the Los Angeles Business Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].