SOMETHING smells fishy in the market. And the aroma seems to be coming from Goldman Sachs.

As you probably already know, stock prices have been roaring for seven weeks.

This has created a historic rally despite the fact that the economy continues to be in serious trouble, banks are still wheezing under the heavy load of bad assets, workers are being laid off each month by the hundreds of thousands and nobody seems to have answers to our problems.

All these issues are well known and there's no reason to replay them here.

I told readers at the beginning of the year that the economy would start looking better - although not necessarily performing better - in the spring because of statistical aberrations coming from Washington. And I even predicted that stocks would rally because of the perception that happy days were here again.

So - a big rally.

Prices had been up as much as 25 percent since March 9. And they are still up 22 percent as of yesterday.

But can you trust what the stock market is now doing any more than the rally last summer that ended badly or the one last December that ended horribly?

The optimists on Wall Street will tell you that stock prices always rally ahead of an improving economy.

And let's hope what is happening now is just that - the chirping of Wall Street just before an economic thaw. There are, however, reasons to be cautious about Wall Street's celebration. And since nobody else is bothering to hurl caveats at you, I guess it is up to me.

According to an outfit in Sausalito, Calif. called TrimTabs, the flow of money from regular investors (that's you and me) into the stock market has been rather moderate considering the 7-week market run.

For the five days that ended Wednesday, April 22, for instance, TrimTabs estimated that people actually pulled $411 million out of stock mutual funds. That period coincided with a 2.94 percent drop in the Dow.

In the previous four trading days (one less because of the Good Friday holiday) the Dow fell 0.7 percent even though regular folks put $2.7 billion into stock mutual funds, according to TrimTabs estimates. Since the beginning of March, when the stock market rally began, TrimTabs says investors put a total of $10 billion in stock funds.

That's a very modest amount. A source at the firm says he would have expected two or three times that amount for a rally that pushed stocks up by 25 percent.

So, who's moving the market? Professional traders, with Goldman Sachs leading the way.

According to the latest numbers put out by the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman did twice the number of so-called big program trades during the week of April 13.