Welcome to the Dividend 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 once again.

Here we are now well under the summer and really wanting to keep

these calls going. I think that there may be certain periods of time in which the calls feel

a little bit more timely or necessary just around market activity and then there may be other

times where people feel that they're a little less needed. But I think that the problem with trying to do these calls only around those moments

of emotional urgency is it reinforces a fallacy that these particular headline-oriented moments of

time are, in fact fact more significant than others.

To the extent that we think there's always things happening in the economy, in the marketplace,

and the news cycle that weren't discussion.

And in fact, sometimes the quieter times might be more significant to real important and long-term

happenstance in the marketplace.

We don't want to focus on the sensational over what to some people seems like the mundane.

Markets never really feel all that mundane to me, and I don't think they feel that mundane

to my family that is cursed with living with me either. But,

Scott, we have had a kind of interesting summer. I talked a little bit in Givin Cafe on Friday

that for all the people who think it's a rough and troubling and exciting kind of market,

the fact of matter is that volatility is below average, returns are above average.

And so maybe it's not quite as exciting as it seems, but I think people's tolerance for excitement

or feeling about excitement is somewhat adjusted over time and it gets recalibrated when things seem to be going so well that then what would normally be a lower volatility event feels like a higher impact event because people have maybe gotten a little bit.

I guess I don't want to say spoiled, but it is kind of what I want to say.

So anyways, Scott, I know you have a lot of questions that are on the table today.

...