Most days it's a pleasant business to check the progress of one's stocks and mutual funds. Too pleasant - a sense of uncertainty and the natural messiness of life is missing.

For months now, analysts who keep track of sentiment toward stocks have been decrying an overabundance of bullishness.

In the domestic bond market, and in international markets for both bonds and stocks, skeptics complain that investors aren't getting paid as much as they should for taking extra risk.

Prominent investors regularly voice their misgivings. One of the latest was Michael Steinhardt, the long-time hedge fund manager, who warned last week, ''There are some signs of a little bit of excess.''

It's not as though we're back in the 1990s, when stock prices soared in open defiance of all traditional rules of value. In those days ''irrational exuberance,'' in the phrase popularized by then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, was on display for all to see.

Now, by contrast, the price-earnings multiple of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index is 18, not 30. To find the signs of creeping complacency, you have to look a little deeper.

For instance, the extra yield demanded by investors in lesser-quality, or junk, bonds has lately dropped to its lowest level in almost a decade. There is some economic justification for this. The rate of default in these bonds has also lately gone to extreme lows, at less than 2 percent per year.

Still, investors are paying little heed to the possibility that defaults might rise, as Moody's Investors Service has lately predicted they will. Moody's sees the rate at more than 3 percent by early 2008.

Other elements of the story can be seen in the stock-index charts. The S&P 500 has not had a losing month since last May - and that was the only negative showing since the end of 2005. It's been more than four years since the index suffered a 10 percent setback.

Investors in faster-moving stocks felt the sting of a substantial decline more recently. Between last May 8 and June 13, while the S&P 500 dropped 7.4 percent including dividends, the small-stock Russell 2000 Index fell 14 percent and a Morgan Stanley index of emerging-markets stocks around the world tumbled 24 percent.

Those chastening risk-reminders proved easy to shrug off, however, as all the losses were quickly recouped. The Russell 2000 climbed back above its early May peak by November, and the emerging-markets index by early December.

A sense of calm and confidence also flows naturally out of the state of the economy and Federal Reserve policy. The U.S. central bank has now held short-term interest rates steady for more than seven months.

When Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before two congressional committees last week, it was clear he was in no rush either to raise or to lower rates. ''You have done a very good job in gaining the respect and confidence of the markets,'' the chairman of one of those committees, Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, told him.

U.S. unemployment, at 4.6 percent, and U.S. consumer-price inflation, at 2.5 percent, are both low by recent historical standards. Bernanke sees signs that inflation is headed lower still, and global economic growth remains strong.

Trouble spots persist, notably in the housing and real- estate credit markets. ''However,'' Bernanke said, ''the weakness in housing market activity and the slower appreciation of house prices do not seem to have spilled over to any significant extent to other sectors of the economy.''

The markets also owe their steadiness to some purely financial forces. The dramatic growth of credit derivatives has changed the way risk makes its presence felt in the bond market. Hedge funds, which play markets from both sides, have helped to diminish volatility by jumping quickly at every perceived pricing anomaly.

Thanks also go to strong, steady flows of new money from sources as disparate as Asian central banks and mutual fund investors.

Are any or all of these forces subject to change without notice? Of course they are. So while the circumstances may fully justify a bullish view of where the markets are headed over time, prospects for perpetual peace and tranquility in the markets are far less reliable. The future is bright, most likely, but it won't always be fun.

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* CHET CURRIER is a Bloomberg News columnist. He can be reached at ccurrier@Bloomberg.net.