With the earnings season beginning in earnest, corporate profits will only be good enough to keep stocks steady, predicts Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at Nuveen Asset Management.

"I think earnings will be OK, not great, good enough," he told CNBC. "I think we will waffle around in the market's trading range."

The Standard & Poor's 500 Index stood at 1,650 in early afternoon trading Wednesday, only 2 percent below the record high of 1,687, set May 22.

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Earnings don't have to be spectacular to keep stocks near present levels, "they just can't disappoint," Doll said.

"Eventually if we're going to have substantial increases in equity prices it has to be earnings, and I come to revenue as well, which requires a somewhat better economy."

The economy grew at a 1.8 percent rate in the first quarter.

Analysts expect profit for companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to show a gain of 1.8 percent in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg.

Earnings rose 5.4 percent in the first quarter, but revenue lagged behind. Analysts forecast second-quarter revenue will increase 1.5 percent for S&P 500 companies, according to Thomson Reuters.

FactSet has cut its second-quarter profit-growth projection for those companies to 0.7 percent from 4.2 percent as of April 1.

"One of the reasons we saw the numbers come down so much is because we saw a record amount of negative guidance," FactSet earnings analyst John Butters told Yahoo.

So far, 87 of 108 companies that have offered an estimate of their second-quarter earnings have predicted growth below the consensus estimate, according to Yahoo.

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