The Market On Tuesday

  Good morning. It is 69 degrees and hazy but sunny here in Upstate NY. We are in a real gorgeous temperature sweet spot. I'm much recovered from my kidney stone episode that began 7 days ago. I was thinking about how we face these challenging moments when in an instant one's life starts moving quickly to being upside down. Not all bad news comes that way some comes gradually, but often we face the surprise change - the accident, the sudden onset of some type of pain. I used to think that car accidents were strictly a malady of modern times but it's in keeping with the suddenness that we often experience a disaster. Pain is a challenge, it wants to pull you out of your stability an into a free fall mentally.

  At 8:40 a.m. ET futures are slightly lower and the price of oil per barrel is up. The market is poised to open lower.

  Investors will be parsing lots of economic reports today including ones on housing and my favorite - consumer confidence. The fighting and deterioration of Iraq continues to weigh in on the minds of the corporate world which as we know is completely reliant on oil for energy. We might add that this is one of the fundamental reasons why a reduction in the use of oil is virtually impossible as oil is built into the infrastructure of our global economy especially in the production and manufacturing corporate end. How does that magically change? It can only happen in a piece by piece one at a time way. This is why I have lost my optimism about a change in the global warming course that the world is on.

CNN: Stocks: Six things to know before the open

The S&P/Case-Shiller index measuring the value of residential real estate in 20 U.S. cities comes out at 9 a.m. ET. The U.S. government will post May data on new home sales at 10 a.m. and the Conference Board will release its monthly consumer confidence index, also at 10 a.m.