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 a special episode of the Dividendin Cafe.

It is special because we're recording on Thursday.

You're getting it on Friday and it is a very rare market holiday on a Friday as we celebrate good Friday and the beginning of the Easter weekend.

We also come to the end of Q1, calendar year 2024. First quarter is done.

We'll hit up Q2 next year. And it has been a fascinating first quarter to say the least this year. I'm recording from Austin, Texas. We were

set to record in our Austin office, but it's been kind of a whirlwind crazy morning of things moving around.

So I'm recording here from the hotel in Austin, heading back to New York City.

And I'm going to be providing clients next week, a much deeper summary of what took place in

Q1 with markets, particularly with various elements of our portfolio.

But my focus today is on a handful of different things that have been on my mind around the

markets, macroeconomic, and we did kind of one of these multi-topic dividend cafes.

First, I'm just going to jump into it in the interest of time, not just my time recording,

but your time listening because I got to think you have some March Madness games to watch

and Easter weekend to enjoy.

Passive investing, it's all the craze, it has seen trillions of dollars go into it.

It's benefited over the last 15 years from a bull market where virtually every year

markets have increased. There's really only been one bad down year and one barely down year.

And that happens at the same time has been a lot of innovation in the product manufacturing

of passive indices.

So it's not a big surprise.

Cap weighted indexes have drawn a lot of capital as some of the biggest companies have become even bigger.

...