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 in markets missive, brought to you by the Dividing Cafe of the Bonson Group.

This is David Bonson. I'm the chief

investment officer and I guess it's Wednesday. It feels weird these holiday, the Monday holiday

weeks throw things off a bit. But we, you know, we're halfway through the week because it's

only a four-day week and two days in a row, the market up 550-ish points, about 1,100

points now in two days. So a big market rally. We're going to walk through health data.

We're going to walk through all our normal categories of things, but let me just quickly

adjust the market move higher today. Look, there isn't a particular headline. There

wasn't a particular announcement. The very best interpretation when the market has this kind of

positive movement is that, first of all, we know of the technical factors that undergird all

of it. We know the liquidity story. We know the low interest rate

story. We know the Tina story. All of those things that are legitimate and are the macro backdrop

to why markets are doing so well. In the very particular daily catalyst to events, I think the

most logical explanation is just a broadening optimism about the economic reopening.

We saw today, just as I was getting ready to go to print here today, that even Los Angeles

County is now opening up for in-store, in-restraint dining, in-store shopping,

up to, I think it was 50% capacity.

It may have been 25%, but it was something and

worship services at churches.

And L.A. County has widely been, you know, they've been saying, oh, they're not opening

to August or whatever, and here we are in May.

...