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

Hello and welcome to today's COVID and markets brought to you by the Dividend Cafe here at the Bonson Group.

This is David Bonson. You know the routine. I'll spare you

all the details. Look, the market ended up kind of flattish today. Dow was up a couple points with

the S&P was down a bit more and it was really just one or two stocks that brought the Dow up. So

kind of a flattish day, but really strong performance from some select shopping mall

reits that will remain nameless, some banks, life insurers, some of the areas you would

expect to benefit from a steepening yield curve.

And I absolutely love a chart that I put in straight from my own FACSET analytics today at

COVID-a markets.com to kind of help explain what's driving the performance in some of these

select industries the benefit from a widening spread between short-term interest rates and

long-term rates.

So you basically have the short end of the yield curve, very short

maturities, six-month, one-year, two-year of treasury bills that their yields have really not

moved this week, last week, or over last month, but you have a longer dated treasury bond, let's call it,

the 30 year, where the yield has spread has gone much higher. So the spread between the short

and the long has really expanded. And that becomes very positive environment for risk taking.

It becomes a very positive environment for the banks and certain companies that are

financially organized around those lines.

So on a macroeconomic standpoint, it's Thursday, which means its weekly jobless claims number,

it came in at $1.87 million, lowest number we've

had since COVID began, but still a very high number and actually a little higher than some of

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