7 Reasons to Worry About Next Week

And just like that, all of this year's gains were gone.

It's been a rough trading week. The tech-heavy Nasdaq closed yesterday with a negative return year-to-date. The S&P 500 slipped into the red by Wednesday's close but sneaked back into positive territory yesterday.

It gets worse.

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
Jaguar Mining (NYSE: JAG  )	($0.03)	$0.09	Add
Schiff Nutrition (NYSE: WNI  )	$0.13	$0.20	Add
H.B. Fuller (NYSE: FUL  )	$0.32	$0.38	Add
SAIC (NYSE: SAI  )	$0.30	$0.31	Add
Charming Shoppes (Nasdaq: CHRS  )	($0.20)	($0.10)	Add
Talbots (NYSE: TLB  )	($0.17)	$0.13	Add
SMART Modular (Nasdaq: SMOD  )	$0.07	$0.23	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 Jaguar Mining. The miner claims to be one of the world's fastest growing gold producers, backed by an aggressive five-year plan to ramp up gold production in Brazil. There's been plenty of near-term pain to get there. Analysts see Jaguar clawing its way toward continuing its streak of consecutive quarterly losses with Monday's report.

There's no such thing on the market as tiger blood, but Schiff does sell Tiger's Milk. The nutrition bars pack a wallop of protein and 16 vitamins and minerals. It's one of the many nutritional products in Schiff's arsenal, though its flagship item is its Move Free joint care supplement.

H.B. Fuller is a maker of paints and adhesives. New CEO Jim Owens was recently installed, so it's probably not fair to pin the projected shortfall entirely on him. This should be H.B. Fuller's third consecutive quarter of posting lower quarterly earnings than it did a year earlier.

SAIC may have the hottest ticket out of this list of losers. The pros see a quarterly profit of $0.30 a share, just shy of the $0.31 a share it earned last year. The military contractor has beaten Wall Street's bottom-line targets in each of the three past quarters. Follow the trend. Work the math. There's a good chance that SAIC won't belong here once next week's results are tallied.

Charming Shoppes and Talbots aren't where the shoppers are these days. How can these two chains be posting losses during the seasonally potent holiday quarter? Charming is a plus-size apparel retailer that has been struggling with quarterly deficits lately. Talbots had bounced back from a rough patch of steady quarter losses heading into the recession. I don't know what Charming and Talbots shoppers like to wear these days, but both retailers are expected to be wearing red next week.

Finally, we have SMART Modular. The company was on the receiving end of a Wedbush Morgan upgrade this year. The analyst was encouraged by SMART's more diversified business model and an end to DRAM pricing wars.

The optimism wasn't contagious. Three months ago, the pros figured that SMART would earn $0.19 a share for the quarter. That target has been whittled down to a mere $0.07 a share, or roughly a third of what it rang up a year earlier.

Why the long face, short seller?
These seven companies have literally 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.