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

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, welcome to Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel with you here. This is Monday, December

the 23rd. We're a couple of days here before Christmas. What you can imagine is a

fairly quiet market day and what will ultimately likely be a pretty quiet market week. Last week's

Dividing Cafe on Friday went through the market sell-off we saw last Wednesday and a little bit

more detail. But for today, we actually had a market that opened up down slightly, at least on the Dow,

to start the day off.

When we kind of grained most of that traction back through the rest of the day, I'm actually

recording this a little earlier than the close just for my own Christmas travel and in

things myself.

But both the S&P and the NASDAQ are positive by over half of a percent.

The Dow is just flirting with a flat number here after being down a little bit more in the morning.

So we've got a decent day and again, light volume, not a lot going on, at least today from a volatility standpoint.

The 10-year yield was up five basis points on the day, so we're at 458, which is actually

a little surreal when I think about it, just where rates have gone since even just September

of this year, September there were below 4%.

So rates have risen, not quite 100 basis points, but pretty close to that in a pretty

short period of time.

And a lot of that is baked in from positive economic momentum. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

And I've written about this a few times. But it's one thing if you've got to ramp up on inflation

in slowing growth numbers. That was what we ended up saying in the 70s and what at one point people were worried about. And that's not what we're seeing here.

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