Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Well, hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe.

I'm your host, David Bonson. I'm recording from our beautiful office here in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, where I'll be leaving shortly.

I've got to spend the last couple of days here.

I had some wonderful times with clients here and now heading off to the next city on what is a little whirlwind of a week.

And we'll get back into New York on Tuesday night.

And there's a lot going on right now in markets. There's a lot going on in energy and a lot going on in the world.

And we're going to dedicate our time today to those things as it pertains to the military operation

that began in Iran last weekend. The kind of major takeaways for investors and how we're thinking

about what is going on and our expectations around all of this, the noise and the legitimate

news elements of where things stand as it particularly pertains to investors.

That's what I want to get into here in the Dividend Cafe.

It's a sobering discussion and, frankly, a little bit uncomfortable

because Dividend Cafe exists to talk to investors about financial ramifications,

about policy issues that matter to markets, to the economy, and war is fundamentally something

that is obviously life-threatening.

And so there's this human life element.

And when casualties are a reality or a possibility or both, and I'm sitting here talking about what it means to

investor or financial return expectations. It's uncomfortable. But I also know what the

objective of Diven Cafe is and I need to stay in that lane and at the same time do my very best to

provide a useful framework for how to think about these things. One of the elements I would say,

because I'm going to move on now, taking for granted that you understand where my priorities

...