Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Thank you, as always, Erica.

I appreciate it and hope everybody is doing well and enjoying the beginnings of summer and hopefully depending on where you are in the

country, enjoying some level of return to normalcy, though I understand that that's definitely

less true in some areas than others. But our goal today is to really unpack a lot of what's been going on in the markets.

There has been quite a resurgence of volatility in the last week or so.

And the only reason I say last week or so, by the way,

maybe Scott will ask me something about this

is because people are totally accustomed to defining volatility only on the downside.

The reality is we've had plenty of volatility beyond just the last few days.

It's just that it's been both upside and downside.

So anyways, I want to be able to really answer your questions, and we encourage you

to send them to us in the middle of this call to COVID at thebonson Group.com, and we'll

address them live on air.

But in the meantime, when we turn it over to our host, Scott Gam,

and let him take it from here. Well, David, thank you so much. And it's great to be with you again,

as always. You know, last time I joked that the market had risen after each one of these calls.

And we seem to be bucking the trend today.

I think the closing price of the S&P two weeks ago when I last spoke to you on this call was

35. We're just below that at 3040. So we'll see if we can get above 3055 by the end of the call.

Now, Scott, you'll have to keep your screen real time here because we're now at 3060 on the S&P as it's moved up.

18 points.

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