Wall Street seems unable to make up its mind about risk-taking.

The market declined sharply on Friday, yet all three major domestic stock indexes are still near their highs. Shares of speculative small companies have been outpacing stable blue-chip stocks lately. And volatile emerging-market equities have shot up more than 16 percent so far this year.

Many market strategists expect stocks to resume their long move upward but say caution, rather than greed-induced euphoria, is appropriate at this stage of the seven-year-old bull market.

“I would not describe this as a ‘risk on’ type of environment,” said Matt Kadnar, a member of the asset allocation team at the investment management firm GMO. “I would describe it as cautious, and at the margins, slightly hopeful.”

Terri Spath, chief investment officer at Sierra Investment Management, agrees. For one thing, she said, “in addition to the risk-on rally in small stocks and emerging markets, there’s also been a rally in ‘risk off’ assets lately.” Long-term government bonds, for example, have returned double digits since the end of 2015, as have some of the most defensive sectors of the market that aren’t economically sensitive, such as utilities.