Coming Week: Added Anxiety

In addition to earnings, traders will be looking for news about Altria's long-awaited spinoff of its majority stake in Kraft Foods (KFT Quote). The company plans to set a date for the spinoff on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Outside the Dow, reports are due from heavyweights such as Google (GOOG Quote), Starbucks (SBUX Quote) and Amazon.com (AMZN Quote), along with hundreds of others .

Trading during earnings season is always treacherous, as Jim Cramer explained in Friday's Wall Street Confidential video . Furthermore, "the things going to move markets -- none of us knows about," says Michael Driscoll, senior managing director of listed trading at Bear Stearns. "There is something [but] you and I don't know what it is. We'll know when we see the headline."

Indeed, the theme for 2007 is "expect the unexpected," according to Driscoll, who notes the consensus view coming into 2007 was for higher volatility, and thus far the consensus has been right.

Amid dramatic intraday and day-to-day moves, the S&P 500 is up just 0.3% year to date.

"As goes January, so goes the year?" the trader wonders. "There could be a lot of movement, but when all is said and done you may look at averages up or down 5%. The swings are going to be very gut wrenching" along the way.

Look for more of the same in the week ahead.