7 Reasons to Worry About Next Week

The Dow hit 10,000 this week, but I'm seeing a lot of zeroes next week.

As we wade knee-deep into earnings season, we'll see a lot of companies that aren't bouncing back the way their buoyant share prices would seem to suggest.

Let's go over a few of the blue chips and seemingly recession-proof companies for which analysts see the arrows pointing down on the bottom line next week. Some of the names may surprise you.

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

Clearing the table
There will be several 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 Coca-Cola. Shouldn't this be the poster child for all-weather investing? The world's leading soft-drink maker provides refreshing escapism for pocket change. It's also a global juggernaut that's presumably thriving in emerging markets that are still growing.

Yahoo! should also be doing better than the bottom-line dip seems to suggest. The advertising market is in a funk, but online advertising should be holding up better. Sponsors are cutting back on print, radio, and television campaigns that are costly and difficult to track, but online programs offer flexible pricing and instant accountability.

Then we have eBay. On the surface, this would seem to be not just a recession-resistant company but perhaps even a recession-loving one. When times are tight, folks can unload their wares and others can usually get them for a decent price. When the pink slips come, budding entrepreneurs can launch home-based businesses using the auction site as their platform. What's a shame, though, is that eBay's online marketplace business has been tanking in recent quarters. Even growth in its steady PayPal unit and forays into free online classified ads haven't been enough to offset the carnage at its namesake site.

Wells Fargo was originally portrayed as one of the healthier banking giants. One can argue that at least it's not losing money like some of its peers, but wasn't the state of the financial-services industry supposed to have improved over the past year? Things certainly seemed pretty bleak at this point last year.

Remember when telcos were dismissed as dying breeds? Conventional telephone service is fading, but AT&T is more than making up for it through higher-priced wireless plans. It has iPhone exclusivity, legally, but AT&T's bottom line isn't playing along.

Janus is now several years removed from its mutual-fund management improprieties. The markets have been rallying since March. Surely inflows have to be positive, and promotional literature is going to look a lot better once the trailing performance data over the past year is highlighting 2009 instead of 2008. Well, the pros still see year-over-year earnings clocking in lower at the fund family.

Finally, we have Microsoft. The world's leading software giant is now less than a week away from the launch of its new Windows 7 operating system, so that may explain why users have been slow to buy Vista. There's a new Office on the way, too. Still, I miss the Microsoft that would keep growing throughout the product cycle. Its first-ever wave of layoffs earlier this year was also supposed to help margins.

Why the long face, short seller?
These reports aren't likely to be pretty. Many of these stocks are market darlings in seemingly healthy sectors, to boot. A carbonated-beverage company is going flat? The only official iPhone seller in the country is calling in sick? This isn't going to be an attractive quarter, even if optimism has a "buy it now" button on eBay.

There is a silver lining, though. Investors are already braced for the worst with these reports. If there is an upside to this grim list, it's that lower profitability is already baked into next week's reports, so the door is open for unexpected surprises.

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