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.

Today is Tuesday, July the 21st.

We'll go ahead and jump right into it.

Markets are closed.

The Dow was up 150, 160 points.

It had been up more than that earlier in the day.

The NASDAQ closed down almost 90 points.

It had been up a little bit, and then the

S&P was just up a little bit. So today looking, the opposite of yesterday and today looking a lot more

like several days last week did. But what might be a little bit more interesting is that healthcare and technology

were hit pretty hard today in an up market day, meaning up Dow Day. And energy was up substantially,

a really big rally in the energy sector.

So, yeah, I guess if you have enough weird days, you can't call them weird anymore,

but today was another weird day.

So in terms of the health data, I'm going to dive into a number of different things.

A good portion of reporting is already taken place. It's a little bit after five o'clock out here on the East Coast. Case growth on Monday nationally was 4.2% lower than Monday of

last week, and the national percentage of positive test was down to 7.9%, which is the lowest positivity

ratio in nearly two weeks. That are both good news pieces. I guess I'll just say it every day,

because I really can't stand the idea of people thinking that I am holding away from the negative

news. It's just that the negative news is, first of all, the same every day. And second of all,

it really is pretty much exclusively in the one category of case growth. And so, you know, the case growth has improved from a percentage

...