Internet stocks are driving the market.

"Just as the Dow Jones industrial average was created 100 years ago we are moving into a new millennium, and it appears the Nasdaq is going to be the gauge for most investors that the Dow was for most of the 20th century," said Tom Galvin, chief investment officer, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. In concert with those gains is a landmark shift in the way investors view the market. Research on the stock fundamentals, a staple of earlier periods, is out. Now the emphasis is on chasing momentum. "When news is good the company is perceived as being good, and business is perceived as good. There is absolutely no reference to risk whatsoever in the price behavior," said John Manley, senior equity strategist, Salomon Smith Barney. Now, as the decade draws to a close, Internet stocks are driving the market. Even old-line tech companies such as Microsoft and Intel are no longer the hot stocks they once were. But the stars of the _00s are unclear. "I have no doubt that the next decade is going to have as many big surprises as we saw in the decade of the 1990s," said Johnson. The big worry now on Wall Street is that with the markets at all-time highs, investors seem to believe that stocks will keep going up forever. That was the sentiment in Japan 10 years ago and the country has yet to fully emerge from its greatest bear market in 50 years.