Not that there was need for words from the legend. His opinion of joy and celebration over market highs is clear.

"This reaction makes no sense," Buffett wrote in a Feb. 27, 1998, letter to shareholders. Highs are good news only for sellers, not for people planning to buy stocks for years to come. Investors should rejoice when markets fall, he wrote.

The reason behind Buffett's view amounts to a truism: You make more money buying lower. Investors would do better buying the Dow stocks at last year's 8000 instead of today's 10,000. But the truism seems lost in the upward momentum of the moment; a moment when everybody wants the market to save their retirements, a moment when everybody is day trading or knows someone who is.

In contrast to Buffett, Prudential Securities' Ralph Acampora interrupted his vacation on a boat in the Caribbean to talk about Dow 10,000 with reporters by phone Monday. Acampora, who draws charts and holds a moist finger in the air to divine the direction of the Dow, said the industrial average will easily make 11,500 this year. The nation is enjoying peace following the end of the Cold War, he said. He compared Monday's confidence in the market to that which followed World War II. "I can get mushy talking about this," he said.

Despite Acampora's warm fuzzies and in a curious contradiction of logic, a poll released Monday shows investors expect higher investment returns at the same time they are losing confidence in the economy and government. The poll, taken March 1-17 by the Gallup Organization and PaineWebber, found investors expect returns in the next 12 months of 15.5%, vs. 12.9% in September and 15.2% in July.

But stocks don't always go up, even over several years. Since 1900, the Dow has gone down in 24% of all five-year periods and 14% of 15-year periods, says Alan Newman of HD Brous. Economist Robert Shiller of Yale notes stocks have done poorly after climbing to high price-earnings ratios as they have in the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, stocks were down for 20-year periods by 54% ending in 1919, by 63% in 1949 and 29% in 1986, he says.

Shiller notes that enthusiasm in today's bull market grew out of the nation's recovery from the recession that ended in 1991. The optimism seems stretched now. After all, much of this bull market's run going back to 1982 has been powered by falling interest rates. Now that fuel is low.

"It is certainly plausible the Dow will not be above 10,000 in 20 years," Shiller says.

Note that at last report Buffett was holding $15 billion of cash. While the talking heads gush about Dow 10,000, he may be dreaming of Dow 8000.