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 16,535 while the Nasdaq eased 31 at 4,537 and the broader S&P500 gained nudged 13 lower to 1,933.
In company news, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has waded into the battle between the FBI and Apple (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; with Apple looking 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.