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 DC today. The month of July has come to an end. I will have some kind of

month closing numbers in tomorrow's D.C. today. We generally know the markets did quite well.

There actually was some beginning of the month downside volatility, but really it's been

quite a good ride ever since that CPI number came and

earnings season began on both fronts kind of adding to the combined theme of inflation going away.

Some light at the end of the tunnel for when the Fed will quit acting silly and the earnings

environment looking reasonably sanguine, therefore adding to the notion

of a soft landing thesis or perhaps skirting away from some of the economic distress that

could come from this tightening cycle. All of those thoughts are kind of mixed in some form of a stew

that have provided some market bullishness. It's not just late July, although it was sort of

added to in July, but really the whole year, that different phases, ebbs and flows, that's kind of the underlying bullish case.

And a lot of those things came to a head in July.

I was on CNBC earlier today.

The link is in the DC Today.com talking about dividend growth, talking about our views of big tech

valuations, and just talking through a couple

specific names, financials, sectors. So it's worth watching if you're interested. But the Dividend

Cafe on Friday, I am doing a second part to it because I do believe that the subject is that big. And we got a lot of

feedback from Friday's Diven Cafe about it helping people to understand bonds a little better,

more particularly credit, which is a more specific category of bonds and then and beyond bonds.

You know, credit includes more than just securitized debt instruments where bonds can be

sold as a security to the to the investing public, but even bank loans and all sorts of other debt instruments that exist

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