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 my first ever Dividing Cafe being recorded here in Nashville, Tennessee.

I am actually flying out in Nashville here in just another hour,

head back to California.

But it's kind of fun to be doing it here in our conference room of the TBG offices in Nashville.

We spent a whole week here.

A lot of meetings, a lot of meetings, a lot of action, a lot of things going on in the portfolio.

Busy times for us at the Bonson Group.

And some of those busy times are what I want to talk about here today.

The kind of current level of market conditions necessitates some sober conversation.

And so what I have done today is try to boil down for you a little summary of a lot of

narratives that I think kind of come together and more or less turn it into a negative.

I turn it into a cautionary tale as to what narratives out there that I would avoid or at least

understand some of the baggage that they carry. Let me just start with kind of where

this current level distress began. And it's a theme that we've had for a long time,

which was the shiny objects that were being run into. That term I made up. And so we at the

Bonsor Group began some time ago referring to things that were being invested in because they were

shiny, because they were popular, because they had momentum, they were speculative, they were hot,

they were new, they were what the cool kids were buying and all those things.

And you got to understand now that anyone hearing me is immediately associating it with a negative

because they've gotten pummeled and it's so obvious that it's been such a bad investment and all that.

But when we first began using the term shiny object, it was entirely, the connotation was entirely the opposite.

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