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 the Monday edition of D.C. today back here in the New York office. What a freezing cold weekend for this Southern

California kid, but nevertheless, a lovely weekend in the world's greatest city. And some fun

things to talk about here today. If I feel like, if it feels to you like I'm going very quickly,

it's because I am going very quickly.

I am running late for an appointment, but I did not want to miss the podcast and video for you all.

Just quickly, I shall say that the market was up big on Friday and then futures opened up last night, up 50 points.

The market opened up about 100 points

this morning and got higher than that. At one point, it gave some of that back and then kind of

bounced around. It did end up closing up 138 points on the day. So 36 basis points as a percentage

higher on the Dow, 22 higher on the S&P, 32 higher on the NASDAQ.

So about a third of a point, give or take, on the market indices.

The S&P and Dow are at all-time highs, but the Russell 2000, the small cap index, is

still down 20% from its 2021 high. That is just weird. Not just that it's still down,

not every index is going to all make it all-time high at the same time, but I have to say that

it is quite strange to actually have the rest of 2000 technically in bare market territory.

Similarly, odd, the best performing country stock markets so far this year, we're only a few

weeks in the New Year is Japan.

It's up over 9%.

That's up after a 28% upside last year.

The worst performing year-to-date is Hong Kong. So even though you could think

of them in a similar region, obviously very different economic circumstances and different drivers

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