AuRico Gold reports on Monday, and Wall Street sees the Canadian gold producer earning just a third as much as it did a year earlier. Gold prices have cooled off, and the bottom line for gold miners will fluctuate wildly given the fixed costs of production as metal prices move up and down.
AuRico Gold is trying. Last month it initiated a dividend policy. The quarterly payouts of $0.04 a share may not seem like much, but it’s a reasonable 2.3% yield given AuRico’s low share price. At the very least, the Toronto-based miner is rewarding investors for their patience.
Mattress Firm went public at $19 less than two years ago. The stock is trading north of $30 these days, but it has also shed 37% since peaking last year.
The rise and fall of Mattress Firm has been swift. The mattress retailer was initially able to make the most of a highly fragmented industry. Consolidating retailers by acquiring smaller regional bedding chains helped pad results, but now is when the California King starts to get lumpy.
Revenue growth is still stellar, even if it’s naturally not entirely organic. Margins are the problem at Mattress Firm, and the pros see profitability nearly cut in half this time around.
Finally, we have BlackBerry. The smarpthone pioneer is generating plenty of buzz today as its new Z10 handset is finally available domestically. However, BlackBerry’s been struggling to grow its user base since peaking at 80 million worldwide accounts last year. Wall Street’s banking on a significant quarterly loss when it reports on Thursday.
If the new BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system takes off this year, it’s easy to see the company’s fortunes turning around, but it’s hard to compete with the open-source beast that Android has become in a global marketplace where price and developer support reign supreme.
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 translates 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.
The article 5 Reasons to Worry About Next Week originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Rick Aristotle Munarriz.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned.
Copyright © 1995 – 2013 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
