By James Brooks First Financial Services Inc.

onday's bond market has opened down slightly with no major surprise in this morning's only economic data and a mixed morning in stocks. The Dow is currently up 42 points while the Nasdaq has lost 24 points. The bond market is currently down 2/32, but due to weakness late Friday we will likely still see an increase in this morning's mortgage rates if comparing to Friday's morning levels.The Commerce Department said early this morning that sales of newly constructed homes fell 2.3% last month. This was a little larger decline than was expected, indicating that the housing sector is still soft, but it was not enough of a variance to impact bond trading or mortgage rates.There are five more pieces of economic data scheduled for release this week that may influence mortgage pricing, in addition to two relevant Treasury auctions. None of the data is considered to be extremely important to the markets, but they do have the potential to cause changes in mortgage rates, especially if a couple of them show significant surprises. Besides the data, we should keep an eye on the major stock indexes also. If they remain in positive ground, we could see the bond market fall further into negative territory and mortgage rates move higher.Late tomorrow morning, the Conference Board will post September's Consumer Confidence Index (CCI). It gives us a measurement of consumer willingness to spend and is expected to show an increase in confidence from last month's reading, indicating that consumers were more optimistic about their own financial situations than last month. Rising confidence is believed to mean consumers are more likely to make a large purchase in the near future. This is bad news for the bond market and mortgage rates because consumer spending fuels economic growth. Analysts are calling for a reading of approximately 46.6, up from August's 44.5 reading. The smaller the reading, the better the news for the bond market and mortgage rates.Overall, it is likely going to be a fairly active week in the markets and mortgage rates again, but probably not by last week's standards. The most important day will probably be Wednesday or Friday, but tomorrow's data can also influence mortgage rates.