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 Dividendon Cafe. By Monday, I am referring to Columbus Day, where today the stock market was open, the bond

market was not, and banks were not. And yet you did have a big rally day. You didn't make back

all of what was down on Friday from the big sell-off Friday, but you did have a rather substantial rally in what is a often

confused or distorted day because of some markets being open and some markets not in the way it affects total asset allocators

and hedging and other trading activity.

But I think we got a pretty robust day out of today. And I'm going to go

through the summary of today and the summary of what's happening in the world because there

is a lot happening in the world. Before I get to markets, I'm going to start with what I consider

the biggest news of the day. The freeing of the remaining Israeli hostages from the atrocity

of October 7,

20, 23, it is over two years that 20 hostages that are still living have been held in brutal

captivity and they were freed today. This is a tremendous cause of celebration.

In other news that is pertinent to markets and what took place on Friday and

then over the weekend impacting markets today, President Trump has said that contrary to other

reports, his meeting with President Xi of China is still on to take place in two and a half weeks at the end of October

going into early November.

And one of the reasons that he would have announced 100% tariffs on these other categories

of Chinese imports is that he made him effective for after that meeting is supposed to be effectively

buying everybody a couple of weeks to cool the temperature and figure out where things are

going, particularly some of the negotiators involved in all of this.

I think the significant thing I want to say about over the weekend, I mean, look, some of it was

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