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 Dividing Cafe.

This is David Bonson of the Bonson Group.

And I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

I think that our country had a much better Memorial Day weekend than had been expected as recently as just a few weeks ago.

We're going to unpack a lot of that.

The health data and the reason why I say

something seemed to have gone better than maybe would have been expected just a short time ago.

But we're also going to talk about the market today where for, I guess it isn't technically

Monday because of the holiday yesterday, but for the second opening day of a week in a row, you had a big move higher.

The market was up almost a thousand points last Monday, and then up at one point, almost

700 today.

We closed up 530 points in the Dow.

And I'm going to argue that the biggest factor behind it was overall

optimism around economic reopening and the fact that the health data is thus far really strongly

confirming the ability to continue safely reopening the economy.

There is some tethering into the whole mix of vaccine optimism, this time a new program

that I'll talk about in a moment.

But I'm of the mindset that the market's too large to be fully being moved by just the mere whisper of yet another promising vaccine situation.

I think those headlines have an impact both negatively and positively, depending on the way the wind is blowing.

But I think the much more logical explanation of today's

market move is just that overall optimism on economic reopening. As we, and by the way,

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