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 of the Bonson Group.

This is David Bonson. I'm the chief investment officer at the Bonson Group. And we had a big sell-off in the market today. Dow down 700 points. At one point,

we were down about 860. Here's kind of the progression over the last 24 hours. Market futures

were really pretty much flat most of last evening all the way up to my bedtime.

I woke up at 315 and we were down 250.

By the time we opened, futures were down 700.

So basically all of the drop was in that kind of pre-market period of about 3.30 a.m.

to 6.30 a.m. We opened down at that level, got down as

much as 8.50, got back to down about 550 or so, and then closed in the middle of those two

ranges down 700. So at covenomarkets.com, you have a chart of the day, a lot of downward movement first few hours, then kind of bounced around and stayed flat throughout the day at that level.

Again, down 700 points on the Dow, S&P, pretty much down at the same level as the Dow was.

COVID case growth and the coverage of it is a fine explanation for market volatility today.

There's a lot of news coverage, a lot of data out there, a lot of headlines and things like that.

Some of them, I think, are really distorted.

Some of them are bad news.

But either way, the sentiment to the market is clearly very negative.

However, I just got to bring up again

for fundamentalists like me, the performance and structured credit again today, mortgages, bank loans,

other credit instruments, does sort of paint a different picture as far as the source of equity, volatility being entirely

related to COVID concerns because these other risk assets actually performed quite well,

either flat or even modestly higher.

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