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 this special edition of the Monday Dividend Cafe.

My name is David Bonson. I am the chief investment officer and managing partner at the Bonson Group.

And I say special addition because we are in the midst of significant market turmoil,

a violent sell-off in markets last Thursday and Friday that looked poised to continue today on Monday.

And we ended up, instead of getting a violent sell-off, getting a little

bit more normal sell-off, we got combined with some very violent volatility, some up-down

gyrations that require our attention. As everyone probably knows by now, it started Wednesday

after the market closed in the Rose Garden

with a rather inexplicable announcement from the White House regarding a very different set

of tariff plans, not linked to reciprocity, but rather basically attempting to penalize those

countries that we buy a lot from.

And the pivot from the White House, the surprise change in how they were structuring proposed

tariffs, really unsettled markets leading to a simply horrific sell-off on both Thursday and

Friday.

Then futures opening up on Sunday night pre-market back to the old days of financial destabilizations,

the COVID moment, the financial crisis, certain key bank failures, things I've lived through many times in my career.

I can remember many a Sunday afternoon

and evening being ruined by such. But last night, continuing in the sell-off on Thursday, Friday,

and the uncertainty around trade war, futures were down about 1,600 points and really stayed down

over 1,000 throughout the evening and then into the very, very early

...