NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Netflix Inc. is defying gravity on Wall Street. It may just be the hottest stock around.

The question is: Can the white-hot shares keep up the momentum?

Or, perhaps, investors are simply grateful to snap up shares in a tech company whose name doesn’t begin with “A” and end with with “pple.” Sure, the company is officially considered a consumer stock, but with an increasing amount of its business going to streaming content and away from its traditional DVD-by-mail structure, it’s more a tech company every day.

Hulu re-writing its script

Is Netflix NFLX, +1.58% going to emerge as Wall Street’s latest flavor of the earnings season? Or will money managers lose faith that Netflix, by all counts a well managed company with a better mousetrap than the competition, can continue to post impressive quarterly profits and make promises of future growth? Read more about Netflix’s earnings.

Netflix’s current earnings powerhouse performance will cheer investors — but it should give the smart ones the jitters, just a bit. If you have a good memory, you’ll remember the public’s infatuation with tech stocks a decade or so again. We all remember what happened when everyone had an conviction based on irrational exuberance — that Internet stocks could go up and up and up.

No stock can, of course. Eventually reality kicks in and investors become disillusioned. It will surely happen to Netflix, too, and it won’t even be the company’s fault, either. It’s all about investor psychology and the power of perception.

Advice to Netflix stockholders: enjoy the ride, for as long as it lasts.

— Jon Friedman