The Week Ahead: Lowes, Hewlett-Packard, Deere Earnings; Existing Home Sales

Investors should welcome a new week, after the significant bloodletting seen in prior days. While Wall Street is certainly hoping for a Santa Claus rally into December, the markets may remain jittery heading into Thanksgiving. The upcoming week should be relatively quiet in terms of volume, as the Thanksgiving holiday limits trading. Markets in the U.S. will be closed on Thursday, for Thanksgiving, but will open on Friday. However, markets will only be open for a half day -- the New York Stock Exchange will close at 1:00 pm EST on Friday. Volume should be light -- it generally is historically -- but the market is still susceptible to swings. Media coverage on Black Friday could mean that retail stocks see some big shifts. Record lines at retailers could mean that those stocks rally, while reports of weak Black Friday sales might pressure retail stocks. On the earnings front, major releases are all but finished for the year, but there are still a handful of companies left to report. On Monday morning, Lowe's

will release its third-quarter results. The stock has been headed consistently higher in 2012, rising around 26 percent. On November 13, competitor Home Depot

released its quarterly results, exceeding analysts' consensus earnings per share estimates by $0.03. On November 16, analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch raised estimates and their price target on the stock for the third-quarter. They wrote, "following strong results from HD earlier this week, we believe home improvement trends continue to improve supported by increased housing market momentum." The analysts raised their price target from $36 to $38 heading into Monday's report. Dow component Hewlett-Packard

will report on Tuesday morning. HP has had a difficult year, as demand for PCs has declined notably. The stock closed Friday's trading session down a whopping 50 percent in 2012 alone. Competitor Dell

posted earnings on Thursday. Shares moved lower after the company missed expectations. While HP is by no means a replica of Dell, both companies are engaged in much the same business: producing PCs that run Microsoft's

Windows. Given Dell's miss, traders might anticipate a disappointing quarter from HP. In a research note this week, Goldman Sachs analysts noted that "while management significantly lowered expectations at its analyst meeting in October, we believe the demand environment has worsened and we continue to see downside risk to the company's outlook and consensus FY2013." New Berkshire Hathaway

BRK-B) holding Deere & Co.

is set to release its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Berkshire's latest 13-F showed that Warren Buffett's holding company added 3.98 million shares of the farm equipment maker valued at around $337 million. Analysts are anticipating that Deere & Co. will report earnings per share of $1.87. On November 16, analysts at Citigroup had some bullish commentary on the stock ahead of the key report. They wrote that channel checks suggested that "high commodity prices, better-than-feared-yields and solid insurance protection has translated in to stable order patterns (esp. for row crop equipment) and rising optimism in to '13." On the economics front, the U.S. will see a number of important releases: existing home sales will be out on Monday. That might affect home building stocks. Last week, Beazer Homes

and D.R. Horton

released quarterly results, with Beazer falling sharply on the back of the data. On Wednesday, both initial and continuing jobless claims will be released. Consensus estimates call for initial claims of 400,000 and continuing claims of 3,338,000. On Friday, there will be more data out Europe: German GDP. Data released last week on Thursday indicated that Europe had descended into recession yet again. Given all the debt problems, that might not have come as much of a surprise to investors. Still, Germany, as Europe's largest and strongest economic power, could shed some light on the state of the Eurozone.