The Fool's Look Ahead

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Monday
The new trading weeks kicks off with entertainment-media retailer Hastings (Nasdaq: HAST) reporting. You may not be familiar with the company, but it's a fair proxy for the leisure-media industry. The company breaks down the performance of its various departments -- from video games to DVD rentals to CD sales -- so investors get a fair pulse of where consumers are spending their dollars.

Tuesday
Retailing powerhouses Target (NYSE: TGT) and Home Depot (NYSE: HD) check in on Tuesday, and you can learn plenty by digging into both reports. Are shoppers gravitating to Target's cheap chic in these penny-pinching times? Is the "staycation" movement finally going to pay off as homeowners improve their digs while they hunker down? Tuesday holds the answers.

Wednesday
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) comes calling on Wednesday. As its ticker symbol implies, Salesforce is a rapidly growing player in customer relationship management and other enterprise-software solutions. Salesforce is a leader in the "cloud computing" revolution, which provides cheaper solutions by keeping everything on a server-stored platform instead of tethered to individual PC hard drives. Analysts see earnings nearly tripling to $0.08 a share for the company's latest quarter, so expectations are high.

Thursday
GameStop's (NYSE: GME) earnings should double to $0.28 a share on Thursday. The leading video-game retailer is on a roll, with console makers such as Xbox-maker Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) slashing prices on their hardware and software makers putting out alluring titles.

Friday
Let's see whether the weekend can get off to a bright start, with China Sunergy (Nasdaq: CSUN) leading us out of the trading week. The Chinese maker of solar-energy cells is part of a very volatile sector, so Friday's news is likely to send the stock in an extreme direction -- either sharply higher or sharply lower.

Until next week, I remain,

Rick Munarriz