Bull, Bear-- or Bearull?

It was a little like cheering for a pole vaulter about to jump or a player running down the field. Day after day, people watched in suspense as the stock market moved toward the magic figure of 800 on the Dow-Jones industrial av erage--now spurting forward, now retreating. The market came within an inch of making it last week (798.85), slipped back to 794.56 at week's end. But most Wall Streeters were confident that the market had the strength to clear the mark soon. And whenever the averages go over another 100-point mark, the entire market gets a vast psychological lift.

Side by Side. Despite this bright prospect, there was a curious lack of elation among many of the professionals. They are not really sure whether they are dealing with a bull or a bear market or some kind of animal in between--perhaps something called a "bearull." The market averages are being pushed up by the active trading of only several key stocks that are weighted heavily in figuring the stock averages. Each of these stocks moved up for good reasons of its own--Du Pont for its new Corfam synthetic shoe leather, Pennsylvania Railroad for its rising earnings, RCA for its booming color TV sales. Last week's star was A.T. & T., whose stock hit an all-time high after the company announced that it would sell one new share of its stock at $100 for every 20 shares held.

While the blue chips thrived, more than 40% of the 1,193 stocks on the Big Board did not share in the rise. Such former favorites as Litton Indus tries, American Photocopy and Fairchild Camera have fallen even below the levels they hit during the brief panic after President Kennedy's assassination. To chart watchers, all this poses a dilemma. Some of them wonder whether market-wide bull and bear markets may have given way to side-by-side, limited bull and bear markets among certain stock groups.

Getting the Message. To many on Wall Street the very selectivity of the market is one of its strongest points. The stocks that are rising are mostly sound buys, and the ones that have dropped were too high-priced. "The fact that many stocks have not participated in the upswing is reassuring," says Walter A. Eberstadt, partner of Model, Roland & Co. "We can finally buy reasonable quality at reasonable prices." The optimists on the Street--who far outnumber the pessimists--find other signs of strength in the ebullience of the economy and in the fact that the market has ignored the Panama and Guantanamo crises--and even a congressional threat to clamp more stringent regulations on stock-trading practices.

Small investors are gradually coming back into the market. This fact alone usually frightens many of the Street's cynical pros, who claim that the public always buys and sells at the wrong time. The facts, of course, are somewhat different. When small investors have begun to buy in earnest in the past, they have usually boosted the Dow-Jones average another 10% to 20% .

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