Stocks have been on an upward swing for a week, and investors are celebrating. Why not? That kind of performance--once the norm--is now about as rare as steak tartare. Right on schedule, Wall Street strategists are busting out the stock screens to feed investor demand for ideas. Not wanting to be left out of the fun, I hereby offer my own.

Using my trusty Baseline machine, I first screened for stocks in nine technology industries: application software, computer storage and peripherals, computer hardware, Internet software and services, IT consulting and services, networking equipment, semiconductors, semiconductor equipment, and systems software. I found 945 of those.

Just to keep things on the up-and-up, and to avoid the clutches of evil penny-stock hustlers, I then kicked out all those with market capitalizations of less than $150 million. That's a fairly arbitrary decision, but hey, life is arbitrary. After that cut, I was left with 416 companies.

Instead of using a price-earnings ratio, I decided to stick to price-sales, for a couple of reasons. First, sales cannot be manipulated as easily as other items further down the income statement. Second, analysts have shown themselves hopeless at forecasting earnings anyway, so why bother with a forward-looking P/E analysis when the industry is in such flux? I therefore looked for all stocks trading for less than one times trailing 12-month sales. Only 100 left.

I did add an earnings component to the screen in the end. I looked for companies with accelerating earnings growth, as any company that is showing bottom-line improvement in this economic environment is worth a look. Keeping only those that showed higher one-year earnings growth than their three-year rate, I was down to 16. Time to stop. The candidates: Computer Sciences, Unisys, Titan, Perot Systems, Gartner, Keane, Ciber, Sykes Enterprises, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Storage Technology, Compuware, Creative Technology, Iomega, ESS Technology, and Systems and Computer Technology.

What's striking about the list? First, what's not on it. Not a single Internet software and services company. No chip makers. No network equipment makers. And no systems software firms. Even after the beating that technology has taken over the past two years, the majority of tech stocks are not cheap. Sales and earnings have fallen as fast as stock prices, keeping valuations high.

The second thing I noticed was the preponderance of IT consulting and services companies on the list. Eight of the sixteen that made the final cut are in that industry (they are the first eight in the list above). The one you might expect--Electronic Data Systems--would have made the list but for decelerating earnings growth. That company's disastrous earnings miss in the third quarter is probably the main reason all these other stocks are on this list, as the implosion of EDS stock dragged its peers down with it. EDS competitor Accenture, mind you, didn't show up on the list either, because investors have flocked to the stock as a relative safe haven in a challenged time.

These are tough times for IT consultants, as companies tighten their belts and bring a portion of their consulting budgets back in-house. And big-ticket contracts are as rare as an up week in the stock market. But six of those eight stocks have lost more than 10 percent of their value in the past month, even as the S&P 500 was notching a 0.6 percent gain. While EDS is a good barometer for the industry (as are Accenture and IBM's Global Services division), and its earnings miss is an ominous sign, investors have likely overreacted by abandoning the stocks of most of EDS? competitors as well.