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 the Monday edition, a Dividend Cafe.

We are going to spend a few minutes going around the horn as we normally do to all of our normal subjects.

I am doing this from the New York City office where I arrived very late on Sunday night.

We'll be here all week.

And then on Friday, I will be recording the last Friday Dividendon Cafe the year doing a special Dividend Cafe Friday

about the first 25 years of this new century and new millennium.

And what the single obvious takeaway of the single obvious investor lesson has been for the last 25 years,

and that will be the subject to the Dividing Cafe this Friday. I will, though, do one final

Monday Dividendin Cafe from Newport Beach next Monday, and that will really be the last of the year. We won't do the

final two weeks of the Friday, which is the day after Christmas, day after New Year's, with the

holidays. Let's say the squeeze is not worth the juice or the juice is not worth the squeeze,

whatever the expression is. But we have learned

that during the holidays, it is best to let that period go. And actually, the week between Christmas

and New Year's, I'll be very focused on the annual, what we call white paper, but basically the

year behind reflections, you're in review and year ahead commentary.

We want to be focused on going into 2026. So once I start talking about what we're doing

and not doing, Dividend Cafe around the end of the year, you know that we are really

wrapping up a calendar year. And indeed, next week, being the Christmas holiday,

tis the season indeed. Although I knew it was the season when I walked from my apartment

to the office this morning and it was 12 degrees. And I had to walk very slowly to make sure I did

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