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 podcast brought to you by the Dividing Cafe of the Bonson Group.

This is David Bonson.

Thursday, August,

the 20th, we continue to trek along. Let me go through some markets action first, and then we'll go around the horn. The Dow was up 50 points today. The S&P was up more than that percentage

wise, and the NASDAQ was up more than that percentage-wise. Big rally from Big Tech today.

But, I don't know, it's not super significant, but the futures were actually down 200 points last night, late.

It's been a while since I've seen late-night futures down.

And then this morning, they had rallied back a little bit on Word that apparently a China

trade discussion was back on. It had been canceled earlier in the week. Then the weekly

job was claims number came and markets came, went down a little further. And then throughout the

day just kind of, you know,

grinded their way back up and like I said on the NASDAQ side,

Big Tech had quite a big day.

So there you go.

The weekly job claims came in at $1.1 million and you recall we had dropped below a million last week.

So that was a step in the wrong direction and the markets didn't like it for about five or ten minutes and then ended up shrugging it off.

The continuing claims, though, did decline by another $636,000.

So that brought that number below $15 million.

So for those keeping score, we were above 25 million in continuing claims.

This is when someone's filed two weeks in a row of weekly unemployment.

And now we're down below 15 million.

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