7 More Reasons to Love Earnings Season

The quarterly reports are flying fast and furious this week, and there are more than a few reasons to get excited.

Yesterday, I went over seven stocks that analysts see posting higher quarterly results this week than they did a year earlier. Thankfully, there are plenty of other prolific companies that are pegged to post year-over-year advances on the bottom line this week.

Let's go over a few more.

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

These are companies in vastly different industries. From high-traffic websites to premium mattresses, from discount brokers to flash memory manufacturers, it's a healthy cross section of sectors that are serving up winners these days.

Yahoo! is actually projected to post stronger earnings growth than its larger dot-com rival, but the search engine is also coming off depressed levels last year. eBay is targeted to post slightly higher net income than it did a year ago, and shareholders will be keying in on how much of that is coming from its namesake auction site relative to its PayPal online payment platform.

Select Comfort makes the Sleep Number air chamber mattresses. The stock has been better than a 20-bagger since bottoming out at a mere $0.33 last year. It is expected to rattle off what should be its fourth consecutive quarterly profit tomorrow. If Select Comfort should earn the $0.07 a share that analysts are banking on, it will have earned $0.49 a share over the past four quarters. You would probably be kicking yourself if you had sold for less than that in February of last year.

Amazon.com is the e-tail juggernaut that Monday posted encouraging Kindle news. It has sold three times as many Kindle books during the first half of the year as it did during the first six months of 2009. Analysts may be concerned about the impact that this month's Kindle e-reader price cut will have on future margins, but Amazon usually finds a way to land ahead of the pros.

Wall Street is braced for E*TRADE to post a loss of $0.11 a share, but keep in mind that the discount broker also recently went through a 1-for-10 reverse split. This would have been just a $0.01-a-share projected loss before the move.

UPS is the parcel-delivery giant, and its quarterly performances are often a fair proxy for the uptick or downtick of commerce in general. Then we have flash memory giant SanDisk. I've knocked the stock given the cutthroat memory market before. I was a party pooper when it introduced its slotMusic cards and players two years ago. Nothing silences my shots like performance, and analysts see SanDisk's quarterly profit more than doubling on Thursday.

There may be a few warts in some of these reports, but the end result should be improvement on the bottom line. If Wall Street is giving us at least 14 companies projected to post year-over-year increases this week, I'll take it.

Which of these seven companies do you think will keep improving in 2010? Share your thoughts in the comments box below.