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

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello, and welcome to the Monday edition of the Dividendon Cafe where the roller coaster ride that is the market has continued.

Last night, Sunday night, my favorite night, futures

opened up quite flat, a little surprising because Asian markets were getting hit at the time.

And yet, of course, U.S. markets had endured some volatility late last week.

And my thought was Asia was playing catch up.

U.S. markets were not up or rallying or reversing at all,

but were not down as much as expected.

And I thought that that might turn overnight.

I was up at 330 Pacific and indeed markets were down 350 points at my wake up. Then, and I'm about

to read word for word, a tweet came out that caused an over a thousand point swing in pre-market

action almost instantly. And I quote from the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,

I'm pleased to report the United States of America and the country of Iran have had over the last

two days had very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution

of our hostilities in the Middle East. I've instructed the Department of War to postpone

any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day

period, end quote. So markets went from down 350 to up 1,150, 1500 point bounce, and oil dropped from about $184.37.

An hour later, still in the pre-market, oil was up to 91, way off the high, but way off the low,

and the futures were pointing to an 800-point market open, again, still way up,

but not as high as it had gotten to. And then the market did actually open and we closed up 631 points

along the way. We had, I want to give this exact number, 1,100 points between

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