ConocoPhillips: Tomorrow's Headliners

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- ConocoPhillips (COP Quote) will be in focus Wednesday as the oil giant will headline companies with quarterly earnings reports on tap.

ConocoPhillips is expected to report a third-quarter profit of 94 cents a share, down sharply from year-ago earnings of $3.39 a share, on revenue of $35.36 billion, according to a poll of analysts by Thomson Reuters. ConocoPhillips is one of several oil companies reporting quarterly results this week, following Valero (VLO Quote) and preceding Exxon Mobil (XOM Quote) Thursday.

In addition to ConocoPhillips, WellPoint (WLP Quote), General Dynamics (GD Quote), Hess (HES Quote), International Paper (IP Quote) and Goodyear Tire (GT Quote) will report quarterly results before the start of trading Wednesday.

After the market closes Wednesday, earnings reports from Aflac (AFL Quote), Express Scripts (ESRX Quote), Symantec (SYMC Quote), First Solar (FSLR Quote) and Lincoln National (LNC Quote), among others, will come due.

On the economic front, the Commerce Department will release the September data on durable goods orders at 8:30 a.m. EDT. Economists polled by Reuters are looking for a 1% increase after a 2.4% decline in August. Excluding transportation, durable goods orders should climb 0.7% after remaining flat in August.

In a separate report scheduled for 10 a.m. EDT, the Commerce Department will release new homes sales data for September. Economists expect that new home sales rose to 440,000 from 429,000 in August, according to a poll by Reuters.

Investors will also be focusing on the Energy Department's weekly inventory report, due at 10:30 a.m. EDT, especially with oil prices hovering near the $80-a-barrel level. Crude oil inventories are likely to have risen by 1.5 million barrels last week, a Bloomberg survey of analysts shows.

-- Written by Robert Holmes in New York.

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