NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- While the debate rages on over whether stocks have found a bottom I want to take a longer-term view.

A better question for investors might be, "Will the market be higher in a year or two than it is now?"

Clearly, the stock market is not fundamentally cheap as we can argue just how bad earnings are going to be this year. One projection values the Standard & Poor's 500 today at a price-to-earnings ratio as high as 19. For a bear market, that is still rather expensive.

I am not talking about timing the market regardless of whether you think it has bottomed or that another big drop is coming. I'm talking about taking a long, hard look at investing, and what its goals really are.

This is not about not buy-and-hope investing. That the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded last month at levels not seen since 1997 is testament to the folly of that strategy. Rather, I am talking about finding opportunity when it seems that none exists.

While buying a share of General Motors GM, -2.37% for the price of a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee (notice I didn't say Starbucks) seems very enticing, there are no guarantees it will pan out. In technical analysis circles, we can say we are not in the javelin-catching business.

But what about the legions of stocks out there that have traded more or less flat since the crash-like declines of September? Even Apple AAPL, -0.75% falls into that category despite the fear surrounding its business and the potential loss of its visionary founder Steve Jobs to health issues.

I'll leave the fundamental analysis to others but it seems to me that Apple is not going out of business. Nobody can really say the same about many banks, automakers and retail stores.

Now, I am not specifically recommending buying Apple now or ever. I just want to point out that unless the economy is going to fully implode, the idea that a long-term investment in stocks -- with proper risk controls in place, of course -- is not such a crazy idea.

So, where do I cash in my insured bank CDs to back up the truck at my favorite brokerage outlet?

Not so fast. Diving into the stock market right now is not a prudent long-term strategy either. But taking a little risk capital and buying small amounts of whichever stocks you feel will survive the recession seems to be a decent plan.

The operative word is "small." Controlling risk is imperative in today's environment and moving large sums back into stocks would be an implicit argument for a bottom. I'm not going there.

For me, sentiment is negative and fearful as I've seen. Analysts talk down the market and the economy and anyone even suggesting stocks now is skewered in message boards. That likely will be my fate here.

But what if analysts' earnings projections are too pessimistic? After all, they have no real visibility into the economy. And even if earnings projections are right on the mark it seems that the bad news has already been factored in to stock prices.

Remember, the stock market started to fall weeks, if not months before everyone acknowledged that something was truly wrong in the economy. It is not outrageous to expect them to firm up well before the last of the really rotten economic news hits the wires.

Michael Kahn writes the Getting Technical column for Barron's Online, which analyzes sectors and markets twice a week. www.barrons.com. Read his blog at www.QuickTakesPro.com/blog