Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Thank you, Erica, and thank you, Scott, for joining us.

Thank you all who are on the call, either by video or telephone or those that are listening

to the replay later. But for those of us right now live, I will turn it over to Scott. Scott,

it's one of those very rare days, actually, since we've been doing these calls now for 13 months

where the market is down as we're in the middle recording, nothing too bad.

The NASDAQ's down a little over 1%. As I'm talking, the Dow's only down 160 points, which, you know, there's going to come a time when people realize that 160 when the Dow is at 34,000 is not what 160 was when the Dow was at 10,000,

you know, let alone less than that, but for so many decades.

But be that as it may, it still has a certain sound to it, and we haven't had very many down days

as of late.

But I'm all yours, Scott, to steer the conversation

where you want. And of course, audience in real time, you can send in questions, as Erica said,

questions, plural, questions at the bonsongroup.com. Scott, off to you, my friend. Well, and David, thanks so much. And

you already nailed it. I mean, just on Friday, we hit record highs in stock. So

understandable to have a minor pullback today, but you were referring to the trend anecdotally

that we noticed that on days that we've done this call over the past year, the market tends to be up. So we'll see if we can continue that trend by the time this, you know,

broadcast is over. Maybe we can, you know, get into the green across the broader markets. But

David, I think that brings up kind of a good starting point, a question that we got from somebody,

which is with the Dow at 34,000,

do you see 30,000 or 40,000 coming next? And I think that's a good place to start here.

Yeah, I guess that's a better question than if I see 35,000 or 33,000 coming next. You know, we're literally right at 34. And so a thousand point up

or thousand point down, it would be like asking me to call heads or tails. Statistically,

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