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

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Hello, welcome to D.C. today. It is Thursday afternoon, January 25th, and great to be with all of you as it always is.

And nice to see a nice positive day in markets, really across the board.

I was a little concerned mid-morning that we were going to end up with a repeat of yesterday,

with markets kind of losing a little momentum.

But we ended up with 242 gain on the Dow, which is great.

The S&P notched a sixth day of gains.

And actually, the bond market moved up in price, too, with yields moving lower by about six basis points.

We've had earnings that have been coming out that have been kind of fueling markets too.

There was a particularly good print from Big Blue today that was nice and market moving.

But we had some quite a couple of different things in the economic calendar come out that I think was really what was behind some of the market movement.

GDP, a preliminary version of GDP for fourth quarter came out at 3.3% and markets were expecting around 2% that I wrote about as of yesterday.

So quite a bit better than expected.

The consumer drove the lion's share of it.

It was about 1.9% of that number. So mostly consumer,

but pretty broad-based, all at all. And that was definitely good news. And I think part of what

moved stocks, and then you had some other figures like durable goods that were flat on the month

when we expected to gain. And also jobless claims that came in a little bit higher than expected kind of

balance out things a little bit. That's why you saw the bond market actually rally with

rates come down a little bit. So kind of a mixed bag in economic data, but kind of a perfect

recipe for a good, nice market today. Volatility remains fairly low. VIX is around 13 or so, 13 and a half.

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