It has definitely been a rocky earnings season thus far, and on Monday, fast food giant McDonalds Corp. (NYSE: MCD) will get its turn to impress Wall Street when it reports its fourth quarter numbers. Shares of the company traded up slightly on Friday in anticipation of the upcoming event. Shares finished the day up 0.19% to $54.10.

So what exactly are analysts expecting to hear from McDonalds for the quarter? Consensus estimates for the company 's most recent quarter are running at 71 cents per share. During the fourth quarter of 2006 the company had actual earnings of 61 cents per share, so Wall Street is looking for a slightly higher than 16% jump year over year.

One thing that we can definitely expect to hear more about during the quarterly conference call will be the company's plan to begin offering mochas, lattes, cappuccinos, and espressos at all of its American locations. This is a strong move by the company to break into the coffee market, but has met some resistance from store owners.

Buy Altria Group (NYSE: MO), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and look for plays on higher oil prices -- such as Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) and Schlumberger (NYSE: SLB), advises Doug McIntyre, a BloggingStocks contributor and editor of financial news site 24/7 Wall St.

He also thinks Ford Motor (NYSE: F) and General Motors (NYSE: GM) should be good investments since he expects union concessions to lift the stocks.

McIntyre suggests avoiding the financial and housing sectors since he thinks foreclosure rates will only climb from here, wreaking more havoc in the credit markets. And he shuns old media such as New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT). Surprisingly, he thinks Barry Diller's IAC Interactive Corp. (NASDAQ: IACI), which owns HSN, the home shopping channel, is really old media in disguise.

I interviewed Doug late last week at AOL's studios in what will be the first of many BloggingStocks video interviews to come. Let us know which of your favorite stock gurus you'd like us to talk to next and what questions you would like us to ask.

My BloggingStocks colleague Douglas McIntyre posted about the activation problems for the iPhone. There are also reports spreading across websites, blogs, and cable television.

The good news -- at least for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and AT&T (NYSE: T) -- is that it looks like there is overwhelming demand. Yet, with all the hype, shouldn't they have been prepared for a mega surge?

A friend of mine, who is a gadget early adopter, bought an iPhone more than 20 hours ago and still can't get an activation.

According to my friend: "I'm still waiting even though my old phone has shut down. I'm an AT&T customer and
the number is porting. An AT&T rep I spoke to said there were some significant delays due to some systems being down since last night."

Well, as for Monday, it should be interesting to hear the spin from Apple and AT&T.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.