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. This is David Bonson, chief investment officer of the Bonson Group, and our COVID-In Markets podcast

is brought to you by the Dividing Cafe. I have, you know, the normal things to go through

today, markets, health data, oil, mortgage housing, policy, market technicals, and a little more than normal on the Fed.

So we'll get into it.

The market was down about 100 points today.

It basically was between flat and down 100 pretty much all day.

So one of the less volatile days we've had in the market in quite some time.

Oil was up on the day, remains around $34 a barrel on WTI.

Muni bonds, I believe, are looking at about 10 consecutive days of positive trading now.

Corporates are off a tad, as best I can tell, not much, between both junk and IGs were off a little. Syndicated loans

seem to be up a little bit, which is only noteworthy because equity markets were down a tad,

and generally they've been pretty positively correlated. But again, it's Thursday, and so that

means weekly initial jobless claims came, and the number came in at 2.4 million, which is around the number that consensus was expecting.

It brings the total number to 38 million of initial jobless claims filed since the COVID pandemic began.

And the economic estimate I got today is that

8 million of those are no longer collecting unemployment, meaning they've either found a new job

or re-secured their old job, which is interesting, 8 million out of 38 million effectively

getting back into the workforce, really before the

economy is actually back up and running. So I assume a lot of those are probably in states

where the economy began reopening sooner than other places. Or some of them perhaps are people

that went on unemployment in the immediate aftermath of COVID,

...