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

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to our national video call.

And once again, as we're trying to do every other week, just present to you the answers to the questions that you have for us, real-time things happening in the market.

And, of course, this particular period happens to be in line with what was one of the most volatile weeks of the market last week, which followed the biggest down day of the year, which was that half day after Thanksgiving.

So between end of the year stuff, the Fed, market volatility, the COVID moment, the fact that as we're sitting here recording right now,

the market happens to be up, up, 700 points. And last week, we had up and down days every day. But all of it speaks to the fact

we're in obviously a volatile time in markets. And so we imagine those things on your mind.

And I'm here to answer those things. And to do so, I brought in my very favorite interviewer,

Scott Gam from Strategy Voice Communications, who as he always does, is going to capability lead us

in a dialogue.

If you can't tell, I'm not in my normal studio.

And so we'll be keeping it short here today because I'm getting ready to jump on a flight.

And so hopefully we'll give you something succinct and useful as you think about the

investing environment we're in.

Scott, you can ask me anything you want. I am all yours. Well, David, thank you, and we will make sure that you don't miss

your flight, but great to be with you as always. And David, let's start off, obviously, with some of the

market action we've been seeing over the past couple weeks, very volatile, as you said, but we're still

not too far off from all-time highs reached a few weeks ago. A lot of uncertainty around the Amacron

variant. What are your thoughts, to your point, as we sit here with the Dow, that's up 700 points?

I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that there's a lot less uncertainty than people might have thought.

And even when there was more uncertainty like a week and a half ago,

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