Corporate earnings will take center stage again this week as certain financials hope to follow last week’s upbeat announcement by banking giant Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) with some decent earnings reports of their own.

Tuesday afternoon’s closing bell on Wall Street didn’t just signal the end of the trading day. It also rang in the start of first-quarter earnings season.

Being a writer in the financial industry means that your words often come back to haunt you.

Earnings season kicked off last week and the results were mixed. Alcoa disappointed investors and quickly dropped 13 percent in the ensuing days. J.P. Morgan (NYSE:JPM) beat estimates, but continued to fall thanks to ongoing concerns about the banking industry as a whole (I know Andy Gordon is planning an article for tomorrow discussing the continuing problems in the banking industry, so you won’t want to miss that).  Intel reported Thursday night and they met lowered expectations.

After a two-day “holiday” to start the week–Martin Luther King Day today (Monday) and Inauguration Day tomorrow (Tuesday)–it’ll be back to business on Wednesday as Congress begins to grill U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner – the appointment many observers believe to be the most important of the new Barack Obama administration.

The base metals were mixed on Tuesday. Copper declined during the pre-dawn hours, falling below $1.38, but then rallied through the day, just coming off its intraday highs late to finish at $1.4846/lb., up nearly 5 2/3 cents.

President-elect Barack Obama said Saturday that an analysis of his stimulus proposal found that the capital infusion could save or create as many as 4 million U.S. jobs by 2010, nearly 90% of them in the private sector.

Investors need to be ready for a downright nasty earnings season. Already, we are seeing some companies cut their earnings estimates by drastic proportions. If you are not prepared, it could get painful.

It’s prime time for small cap investing, says Louis Basenese. Investors need to look for companies with little or no debt and a competitive advantage in their particular field. Louis says E-House Holdings (NYSE:EJ) and American CareSource Holdings (Nasdaq:ANCI) fit the bill, making them great buys right now.

The U.S. economy shed 693,000 jobs in December, a showing that was far worse than economists had expected and that may even have been the biggest monthly loss of jobs in more than 30 years, analysts said of a closely watched survey of business employment released yesterday (Tuesday).