Interesting Day of Earnings Tomorrow

4 Interesting names report tomorrow

Research in Motion (RIMM) - should provide either a boost to or reason to sell off tech stocks

Monsanto (MON) - already preannounced so the good news should already be priced into the stock...

Best Buy (BBY) - with the slow death of Circuit City, the only real competition in the long run will be the Walmarts and Targets and of course those are not specialized competitors. Once we get out of this consumer recession in a few years, Best Buy should be a near monopoly. But for now, we watch it for a read on the consumer - I still think electronic gadgets and the like will be the last thing to go - so it should be relatively strong like the Walmarts and bulk warehouse names. If we begin to see any material weakness in results from a company like this, I would categorize it as even more reason to be bearish on the consumer.

Carmax (KMX) - another "tell" for the health of the US consumer, obviously in the car market. As people move downstream to used cars it is more important of a tell than the new car market which I think is relatively doomed - on record last year saying this would be the worst sales year in 2 decades. (more and more consumers using 7 and 8 year loans - i.e. mini mortgages - to keep buying new cars)

We only own Research in Motion (RIMM) but it's run up so much it's not really a risk/reward I'd want to expose the fund to by layering in more exposure ahead of earnings. That doesn't mean I think it will go down (I have no idea) but I'd rather be purchasing on pullbacks.

As for the consumer tells, again in a backwards way, bulls can explain away any bad results from here on out with the Kool Aid of "that's backward looking, everything will be fine in 6 months". That's going to be the bull case in my opinion for the next 18 months. All bad news can be explained away as backwards looking... and we need to look to the future. One day that theory will be correct, but correct or not, it can be used to buffet the market indefinitely.

Next week we begin to start the actual earnings season...

.... but I still think the Friday jobs report will be the big mover, one way or the other.