Tech-obsessed traders are hoping for a bounce in stocks akin to the January rally.

The notion seems to be that stocks in February have sold off too fast -- as in December -- and deserve a March rally into the next Federal Reserve rate cut. Whether tech stocks "deserve" a rally is unclear. They face fundamental headwinds that are not going away soon. Perhaps traders can get long a bit while keeping one foot out the door.

But investors might want to focus on another possibility getting less attention these days -- nontech names might not be as safe this year as last. Your investment success in nontech this year will depend enormously on the names you own.

The seed of this idea came from reading a short note last week from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter technical analyst Philip Roth. He noted that, "Momentum and sentiment data indicate a substantial degree of complacency. As people have taken money out of tech, they have kept it in the market. ... Investors have clearly eschewed cash."

In response to a subsequent phone call, Roth added: "I think we will need to see most areas of the market come down together at least briefly before the market makes an important bottom. With tech so oversold, we will probably get some relief rally in tech and put off that bottom until April or May."

What does Roth think of the market after last week's mini-rout? Not too much.

In a report released today, he writes,

The medium-term technical recovery that began in October-November, 2000 for the majority of stocks and in late December for the speculative favorites seems to be over. ... Since relative strength has jumped back and forth between defensive stocks (notably health care) and economy-sensitive stocks (including energy) and speculative stocks (including technology), we conclude that there does not seem to be the buying power around (or the willingness to deploy it) to drive up all major stock sectors at the same time. Institutional cash-building and public speculative liquidations are expected to continue, limiting upside potential on rallies.

In a "very general sense" Roth sees a continuing shift toward lower-multiple "value" stocks and smaller-company stocks and away from higher-multiple growth stocks.

Roth sounds right given the current economic fog. No one can say for sure whether we are facing a short slowdown, a recession or worse. Even investors in nontech stocks need to ask themselves how their portfolios would react to unexpected earnings disappointments. (Take a look at the stock-price chart for Procter & Gamble (PG:NYSE - news - boards) if you want to see the damage an earnings miss can do to a large-cap bellwether.) Hey, it's not just tech that can miss.

Some nontech sectors are, of course, more vulnerable to disappointment than others. To get a better handle on which ones are, Joe Kalinowski, equity strategist at First Call/Thomson Financial, weighed in.

Kalinowski has a neat method for sizing up the likelihood that companies might miss, and that such misses are not priced into the stock prices. It turns out that the more unanimous Wall Street analysts are in their earnings expectations for a company, the greater the chances they will be wrong and the stock price will be punished. Kalinowski also tracks stock valuations so that you can get a feel for what you are paying for estimated earnings. He uses the price-to-earnings-growth ratio (the so-called PEG).

Here is how to use his method. Avoid stocks for which analysts' earnings estimates are close together and the PEGs are significantly above historical norms. Simply put, you generally do not want to pay up for apparent earnings certainty. When you overpay and the analysts turn out to have been blindly optimistic, the result is devastating to your capital.

Kalinowski sees three nontech sectors that meet these two unenviable criteria -- financial services, capital goods and health care. In each of these three sectors, PEGs are near the high end of their historical range, and analysts are extremely confident that the companies will not miss Wall Street's earnings estimates. Last year, these were three of the better-performing sectors.

The point is, according to Steve Galbraith, U.S. strategist at Morgan Stanley, "You can get a touch more creative than all piling into the big (and expensive) nontech names largely because they are, well, big." He sees the most excess in the financial and capital goods sectors. In financials, for example, he cites American International Group (AIG:NYSE - news - boards) and Charles Schwab (SCH:NYSE - news - boards). That goes for General Electric (GE:NYSE - news - boards), too.