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US shares made a nervy start to Tuesday Morning as markets continue to follow the tendency of the oil price.
The US followed European shares which headed south and as the volatile oil market came into focus again.
Brent crude slipped around 1.5% to $34.15 while the West Texas Intermediate spilled almost 2.3% to $32.64 ahead of a speech by Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi.
The Dow was around 85 points down at 16535 while the Nasdaq eased 31 at 4537 and the broader S&P500 gained nudged 13 lower to 1933.
In company news Microsoftco-founder Bill Gates has waded into the battle between the FBI andApple(NASDAQ:AAPL) over the hacking of a phone belonging to one of the killers in the December mass shooting in San Bernadino.
The two are in a legal battle; withApplelooking to protect its code - which is covered by the US's free-speech law - while the FBI want to weaken the encryption process to help with investigations.
Shares in Apple eased almost 1% in New York to stand at US$96.
Elsewhere Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is pitching its cloud computing service to big U.S. banks including CitiGroup (NYSE:C) and JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM).
It is a move to break into financial services which has long been dominated by International Business Machines IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT).
Microsoft lost around 1.5% to $26.23 while IBM lowered more than half a per cent to $132.84. Amazon was more than 2% down at $547.54.
It wasn't all doom and gloom however as Home Depot (NYSE:HD) saw sales hike almost 10% in its latest quarter leading it to beat market expectations.
The home improvement tool retailer also lifted its quarterly dividend 17% to 69 cents a share. Shares of Home Depot which have fallen around 5% this year were 1.7% higher at $125.
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