7 Reasons to Worry About Next Week

The Dow fell through the trapdoor marked "12,000" yesterday.

The market loves round numbers, though in reality all of the major market indexes have come a long way since the market bottomed out two years this week.

Despite a bumpy week, it's been a great two years of bullish gains.

It's not all perfect, though.

There are still plenty of companies posting lower earnings than they did a year ago. Let's go over a few of the names that are expected to go the wrong way on the bottom line next week.

Company	Latest Quarter EPS (estimated)	Year-Ago Quarter EPS	My Watchlist
American Oriental Bioengineering (NYSE: AOB  )	$0.08	$0.14	Add
Jinpan International (NYSE: JST  )	$0.28	$0.39	Add
Brown Shoe (NYSE: BWS  )	$0.15	$0.16	Add
GeoEye (Nasdaq: GEOY  )	$0.37	$0.52	Add
PacSun (Nasdaq: PSUN  )	($0.32)	($0.26)	Add
General Maritime (NYSE: GMR  )	($0.29)	($0.22)	Add
Harbin Electric (Nasdaq: HRBN  )	$0.60	$0.62	Add

Source: Thomson Reuters.

Clearing the table
There will likely be more companies posting lower earnings next week, but these are just a few of the names that really jump out at me.

Let's start with American Oriental Bioengineering. The stock may be wooing value investors with its compelling valuation metrics, but low P/E ratios expand as earnings contract.

It gets worse. It's not just about the Beijing-based pharmaceuticals company posting a lower profit than it did a year ago. Even the $0.08-a-share estimate may be generous. American Oriental Bioengineering has clocked in below Wall Street's bottom-line estimates in each of the seven previous quarters.

Jinpan is popular with our Fool community. It commands the highest five-star rating in Motley Fool CAPS. Unfortunately, the Chinese manufacturer of electrical components is looking at quarterly profits that are 28% below last year's showing.

Brown Shoe is the company behind Famous Footwear, Naturalizer, and several other shoe-retailing concepts. Brown Shoe provided higher guidance earlier this year for fiscal 2011, but it's apparently not helping with how analysts feel the footwear retailer closed out fiscal 2010.

GeoEye's snapshots are out of this world. The company takes satellite photographs of terrain that are used by mapping websites, energy companies looking for oil reserves, and the U.S. government for surveillance purposes. Investors may want to shield their eyes with its next quarterly snapshot.

Pacific Sunwear has had its share of wipeouts over the past few years. A retailer of beachwear and other active apparel isn't supposed to thrive during the holiday quarter, but PacSun has been an all-weather dud. You have to go back to the summer of 2008 to find the last time that it came through with a profitable quarter.

General Maritime's fleet of vessels transports crude oil. Prices may be heading higher, but General Maritime's deficits are widening. It sold off some of its oil tankers to beef up its balance sheet, but it's still looking at its fifth consecutive quarterly loss.

Finally, we have Harbin Electrics. This is peculiar blip for the Chinese maker of electric motors. Analysts see Harbin's profitability growing by 56% for full-year 2010 and 14% in 2011, but this is slated to be a rare step back to close out the 2010 reporting year.

Why the long face, short-seller?
These seven companies have seen better days. The market has rewarded many of these stocks with reasonable gains over the past year, but they still haven't earned those upticks.

The good news here is that Wall Street already expects these companies to deliver shrinking bottom lines. In other words, the bad news is already baked into the shares.

The more I think about it, the less worried I become.