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 of the Dividing Cafe. We are officially at the end of the first half of 2025.

With today's market close, we now will enter into the second half of the year for the remainder of this shortened week.

The week will be shortened by the 4th of July holiday on Friday.

For clients on Wednesday, they will receive a pretty thorough weekly portfolio

holdings report as they do every Wednesday, but this will also include a significant amount

of the kind of quarterly summary.

We're only right now, as I'm sitting here recording, about 40 minutes from the close of the quarter.

So I haven't compressed all the final closing data, but we know enough to know that this was a historical comeback and markets that

all took place intra-quarter.

And in fact, as I point out in the divinycafay.com today, that it broke a record from 1998

where you had had the market drop in late August 98 and it was 59 days for

the market to make a new high. There have been 17 times in modern history of the market dropping

over 15% and the 55 days that this represented from its p excuse me trough to a new high represents an all-time

record and that's really just remarkable there have been times where the market had dropped

and it was you know over a thousand days until the market made a new high.

Now, multi-year bear markets are one thing. This obviously was event-driven and I talked in the

Friday Dividing Cafe about the very unique issues that were catalyzed by particular events.

Initially, the trade tariff war that

ended up being substantially backtracked. And of course, the U.S., Israel, Iran situation last

couple weeks. So the general theme of unpredictability of events and unpredictability of

market response to events is still something

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