We're in the thick of earnings season. That's as good an explanation as any for today's wobbly session on Wall Street -- although record-high oil prices undoubtedly had some influence, too, on the Dow's 122-point sell-off.

Last Wednesday and Friday, the stock market responded enthusiastically to strong quarterly earnings reports from the likes of IBM and Google. But last week's big rally (which shot the Standard & Poor's 500 index to an 11-week high) also left the market vulnerable to profit taking.

All it took, this morning, was a cautious outlook from Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) to bring the sellers out in force. TXN actually had a fine quarter, with operating profits up more than 18% from a year ago. However, the company acknowledged a slowdown in the segment of its business that provides semiconductor chips for cell phones. So nervous traders turned tail and ran.

How seriously should we take this kind of one-day tempest? Not very. From a technical standpoint, the evidence is shaping up for a broad, sustained rally in the second half of 2008, probably reaching into 2009. If I'm correct about that hunch, TXN and scores of other large-cap stocks that have gotten roughed up during the current earnings frenzy will bounce back a long way.

At just over 14X this year's projected profits, TXN is remarkably cheap for a technology leader with a pristine balance sheet (no long-term or short-term debt -- zero).

I'll keep you posted as earnings season wobbles on...