Welcome to the DC Today, your daily market synopsis of the Dividing Cafe,

brought to you every Monday through Thursday to bring you up-to-date information and perspective

on financial markets.

Well, hello, and welcome to a Monday edition of DC today.

I have missed being with you.

I was out for a few days last week with my family.

And I know that Brian Sightel capably filled in covering the DC Today, even as the market was experiencing the most downside volatility it had seen all year.

And hopefully you got a lot out of the Dividing Cafe on Friday. I enjoyed going through

a lot of those different subjects, questions that had come in. And so if you didn't get a chance

to see Dividendon Cafe, either reading it at Dividendon Cafe.com or checking out the video.

I would encourage you to do that. But now we're back in the thick of it.

We have one more day in the calendar month of February to get through. I'm actually going to

have Trevor Cummings fill in tomorrow in D.C. today because I will be flying to New York City

after the market closes tomorrow and landing late tomorrow night and then we'll be there

on until near the end of the following week and then we'll be doing the normal DC Todays

and dividend cafes and weekly portfolio reports and all that good stuff from New York.

Quite a few meetings coming up and different things of

importance happening out there. But in the meantime, I just want to summarize what kind of

happened in the market today, walk through a few things and then get you on your way. It was

a odd day in markets in that futures were totally flat last night when they opened

were flat still at the time I went to bed.

And then this morning they were up about 200 points, about 100 points when I woke up,

...