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 what I guess is

going to be the final Dividing Cafe of 2024. I wanted to do this Monday edition just because I wanted to have something here

in the final week of the year. And yet I am out at my desert house in beautiful Rancho Mirage,

California, where I am supposed to be working away all week on our annual year behind year ahead white paper.

And indeed, that will be the major writing focus of the next 72 hours in my life.

I'm very much hoping to have it done by Friday.

And then we're going to put it out as the Dividing Cafe next week.

And so this is what we've done for many, many years.

For those of you who have followed Dividing Cafe or been part of the Bonson Group for a long time.

And this year in particular, it's a big project.

There's a lot to say about the year that just was and a lot to say about the year ahead.

And it's a research project and a

writing project I take very seriously. In the meantime, we did have a market day today. So I'm going to

make a few comments on that, do our normal around the horn with policy and the Fed and housing.

President Elect Trump is doing a great job of keeping me on my toes with various

policy announcements and projections and things. So I'll cover a few of those things. And then we will

have a dividend cafe this coming Friday that I'll record back at the Newport Beach office at the

end of the week. And then we start the new year next week, Monday, January 6th,

with our normal schedule of everything resuming. So our schedule always gets a little off around

the holidays. I presume yours does too as everybody has travel and and different things going on.

So we're doing our best to stay on top of things, keep you informed, and also keep the

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