5 Reasons to Worry About Next Week

The economy is showing signs of fumbling the recovery.

Marc Faber was on CNBC yesterday, suggesting that there's a 100% chance that world is heading back into a recession.

Sure, he's the publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. No one's expecting him to be bullish. However, there are a lot of people getting impatient with the slow pace of this supposed economic turnaround.

It's not just iffy news at the macro level.

There are more than a few companies that aren't pulling their own weight in this supposed economic recovery.

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

Source: Thomson Reuters.                         

Clearing the table
Let's start at the top with Tiffany.

The upscale jeweler is having a hard time selling its bling these days. Analysts see a marginal 2% uptick in sales, but margins are getting iced.

The scary thing about the $0.74 a share that the pros are projecting is that analysts have overestimated Tiffany's profit potential in each of the two previous quarters. The retailer had rattled off seven consecutive quarters of market-thumping bottom-line results before coming undone these past two quarters. The trend points to Tiffany earnings a bit less than $0.74 a share on Monday.

TiVo is the company that pioneered the digital video recorder -- or DVR -- industry. These days many people call their DVRs a TiVo, but it's actually not a TiVo.

The company has been successful in flexing its intellectual property. TiVo's patent-rich portfolio finds many cable and satellite TV providers paying TiVo royalties. Unfortunately, analysts don't think that the company will turn a profit when it reports on Wednesday.

Yingli Green Energy makes solar energy products. This was a booming business a little more than a year ago, but the industry has felt the pinch of Europe's slowdown. Even China isn't the hotbed of growth that it used to be.

Yingli was profitable a year ago, but it has gone to deliver three straight quarterly losses. Adding insult to injury, Yingli has posted larger deficits than analysts were expecting in each of the three quarters. No one will be surprised when Yingli serves up what should be its fourth consecutive quarterly loss.

From network encryption to mobile backhauling Ciena is a jack of all networking trades. Unfortunately the pros see Ciena posting a small quarterly deficit on Thursday, reversing a modest profit a year earlier.

Investors probably shouldn't get discouraged here. This is starting to sound a lot like where Ciena was three months ago. The market was banking on a small loss, but Ciena surprised them with a quarterly profit.

Finally, we have OmniVision Technologies. The company was sitting pretty a couple of years ago as the top dog for image sensor devices in smartphones. The competitive landscape is heating up, and that's likely to result in profitability taking a big hit when OmniVision reports on Thursday.

Why the long face, short-seller?
These 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. Lower earnings translate into higher earnings multiples, and nobody wants to see that happen.

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.

If five reasons to worry aren't enough, let's make your future No.6. There's a single shocking truth about your retirement that you may not know. It's part of a free report that won't be around forever, so check it out now.