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.

Potentially, the post-shutdown Monday is upon us. Now, as a matter of technicality, the government

remains shut down as I'm sitting here recording Monday afternoon and probably will be for

another day or two. The president's targeting Wednesday to wrap all this up. But what we know

at this time is that the votes have been there and recorded to overcome

filibuster. And at this point, the rest is more or less procedural technicality. There are a couple

little hiccups of things that have to get done at the Senate, then to the House, then to the

president. But basically, the major hurdle that's been keeping the government from reopening

is the 60 vote threshold.

And that has been overcome as eight Democrats crossed the aisle to come and agree with the Republicans

to reopen government.

Previously, the Democrats were blocking such from happening. There was one Republican Senator Rand Paul of the great state of Kentucky

who did not vote with this resolution, but the Democrats got eight, which brought it to 60,

and here we are. Now, I'm going to address all this further in our

public policy section, but I wanted to lead with that because it certainly was the big story

of the day, although a pretty meaningful rally in markets was quite a story as well,

but we're going to put some of that in context after what took place last week.

It was the worst week last week for the NASDAQ and the AI space since the April Liberation Day collapse.

But then now today the NASDAQ was up 2.5% in one day with technology being the leading sector there they're up over 2.5%.

So quite a comeback in the stuff that was most beaten up last week.

The S&P itself was up 1.5% today.

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