TANONAKA: A number of high-profile earnings reports could entice investors back into the U.S. market after Monday's lackluster session there. Retail giants, Home Depot, Wal-Mart and JC Penney are all due to post second-quarter results prior to Tuesday's opening bell. We go now to Sasha Salama. She's at the Nasdaq marketsite in New York. Sasha, are the retailers looking at positive or negative news?</s>SASHA SALAMA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Dalton, the retailers are really going to be the last hope for these markets because if consumers continue to show strength, as they have been, that will be seen as a real positive, and really lackluster results, potentially, are expected from these retailers. But the discounters expected to do very well. The manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy has been in a recession, and the big fear on Wall Street is that that weakness is spreading to other sectors. So we will be watching out for those. And there's some key technology stocks that will be in focus. Technology companies like Applied Materials, the No.1 maker of computer chip equipment, it's reporting results after the close Tuesday; just three cents a share expected, which would be down from 70 cents in the year-ago period. That's AMAT. We're also expecting results from BEA Systems. And we're going to be watching volume after Monday's session, when we saw the lightest full-trading day of the year, a gain of 1.3 percent to 1982. We'll see if activity picks up again, but then again, it's the dog days of August -- Dalton.</s>TANONAKA: All right, Sasha, thank you. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Several High-Profile Earnings Reports Could Entice Investors