Many investors expect the economy to stay not too hot and not too cool, and they may be right about the year's first half. But trouble looms on the horizon.

The odds that the U.S. stock market will win its current bet look daunting.

Investors who've been pushing up stocks are betting that the U.S. economy will produce a big enough increase in earnings to keep stock prices headed higher and at the same time show enough signs of weakness to prevent the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates in 2010.

Seems like trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle?

Well, I think the odds are better than you might think -- for the first half of 2010. Then they get progressively worse until, by 2011, the chances that the stock market will get the precise balance it...