Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to the Dividing Cafe. I am your host, David Bonson.

We are doing a special Thursday, July 3rd release of the Divident Cafe this week because Friday,

when the Divinity Cafe normally goes, is 4th of July, our nation's 249th birthday.

And we wanted to get Divinity Cafe out to you beforehand.

We hope you enjoy your long holiday weekend.

But in the meantime, I want to talk to you today

about one of the things that I consider perhaps the most important subject in all of investing,

dealing with the reality of bubbles, of manias, of speculative affairs that are capable of doing absolutely fatal damage to investors.

It would be easy enough to say the solution to dealing with bubbles is to avoid them all

together and thereby not have to worry about the aftermath of bubbles and what damage they can do for investors.

The problem is it is never quite so simple.

First of all, all of the people I'm talking to right now are people, human beings, human people, susceptible to conveniently forgetting and ignoring and not liking the

message about bubbles when that message is most important.

So we're going to talk a little bit today about the psychology of some of this that I think

is at the very foundation of what we do for a living at the Bonson Group, why this profession

exist in a lot of ways.

But secondly, even apart from some of the sort of behavioral and human psychological elements

to this that, again, are embedded in human nature itself, bubbles are often not very easy

to identify Alan Greenspan, I think erroneously,

but nevertheless famously, that one can never know something is a bubble until the time that

it is burst. And I'm not sure that's entirely true. Joe can Dividendon Cafe this week, the famous line from Justice Potter Stewart, he was talking

...