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 the Monday edition of the Dividing Cafe. I am really, really happy to be with you.

Very grateful to Brian Saitel for filling in for me last Monday as I was out

of town with my family for a few days. I am now in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where like much of the

country, there is a bit of a heat wave going on. Summer is most definitely officially here.

There is a lot to talk about the Dividing Cafe today,

so I'm going to get right into it.

Obviously, the big story of the weekend being the U.S. attack on Saturday night

of the spots where Iran has famously been experimenting and preparing and planning and building various

nuclear capabilities.

And there was a lot of, shall we say, apprehension coming into today's market day as to what

it would mean for markets, where we are going.

There's a lot of uncertainty as to what retaliation

may be there, what the next military steps may or may not be from the United States. And it is

yet another example in my running log of now many thousands of examples where sometimes the media, sometimes really not very smart

people, sometimes very smart people could have a general expectation of what may come to be

that is the exact opposite of what does come to be.

There's a lot of reasons for that.

We're going to unpack all of that and more today.

Let's just sort of first get into today's market action

before we get into more details around the U.S. activity in Iran.

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