7 Reasons to Worry About Next Week

And -- just like that -- year-to-date market returns are negative again for 2011. The market was already in a foul mood before yesterday's plunge, but global turmoil and country credit ratings aren't alone in upsetting investors.

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.

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.

After posting five consecutive quarters of year-over-year earnings growth, GameStop may finally prove mortal on Thursday. It's about time, really. GameStop managed to show some impressive tenacity in recent quarters, since industry sales have been sluggish for more than two years.

GameStop has managed to keep growing as a popular reseller of used games and gear at healthy markups. It has also countered the digital delivery revolution with some acquisitions of its own. To be fair, analysts see this as a one-time blip. They see GameStop bouncing back to earnings growth for the current quarter and for the entire fiscal year. We'll see if they still feel that way after hearing from the small box retailer.

E-House is a leading real estate agency in China. If you thought that the Chinese economy was booming because it was growing at a far healthier clip than the rest of the world, you may have overlooked the real-estate bubble that's been building in the world's most populous nation. It's apparently catching up to E-House now.

Staying in China, SINA runs one of the country's most popular online portals. This is also the company behind SINA Weibo, the hot micro-blogging platform that's garnering viral Web 2.0 love in the country. It may be a shock to see analysts targeting profitability to be cut by more than half, but this doesn't mean that SINA has stopped growing. These same pros see SINA's revenue climbing a healthy 21% during the period.

A few implosions by networking equipment makers have sent shares of Brocade down to two-year lows this week. Brocade will have the chance to speak for itself come Thursday, though Wall Street already sees a slight dip in profitability.

Much like the sun, solar energy stocks rise and set in popularity. JA Solar -- a Shanghai-based maker of photovoltaic modules and solar cells -- may be on wrong side of the sun right now, but it also announced a $100 million share repurchase plan this week. That should help ease some of the sting.

Marvell is a beefy semiconductor giant with a $7 billion market cap. Wall Street is targeting a profit of $0.37 a share for Marvell, just short of the $0.40 a share it posted a year earlier. The bad news here is that Marvell has missed analyst estimates in its two previous quarters, so the trend isn't its friend right now.

Finally, we have Sears.

I went to Chicago with the family earlier this summer. I asked a cabbie to drive us out to the Sears Tower. He gave me a blank look.

"It's the Willis Tower now," he said. "It hasn't been Sears in years."

Like so many things Sears-ish, we tend to forget that it's there -- or not there. I didn't know. I wasn't just setting myself up for the obvious "whatchu talkin' bout Willis" comeback.

Perhaps that's why Sears has delivered a decade of cascading comps. At least the parent of K-Mart and Sears is still around, though a steeper deficit during the sleepy summer months isn't very comforting.

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.