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.

Hello, welcome to D.C. today on Thursday. Today is March 21st. And it's great to be with you here as it always is on another nice

update here. So we've got follow through from yesterday's nice rally of 400 points again today.

Another big update. Rates on the day were basically unchanged. And so we're just still digesting

more or less what the Fed went through yesterday with their

statement and press conference. And, you know, like I mentioned yesterday, they did have mention

on quantitative tightening and just starting to ease that back a little bit. That's meaningful

to markets. And then they added a PCE goal for the year, target, a 2.6, you know, which is on the way to 2%, but not at 2%. And so I think it's just where things are going and knowing they need to start easing policy before they actually get to 2%. There's still the three cuts priced in for this year. I think those things are good. And so markets are feeling good about all those things. And my comment is just, just remember that markets

price things in in advance. A lot of that step is baked in at this point. I don't want people to get

too ahead of themselves. There's a lot of soft landing narrative and good things now priced into

markets. And so I suspect going forward, it's going to be about how those company fundamentals

are going to keep pace with

what the valuations of their names are actually trading at. I think some will do better than others,

and I think it's a time to be very selective. But all in all, generally speaking, the numbers today,

the economic numbers were also all pretty supportive of that soft landing narrative. We had jobless claims that were about in line.

We got a 210 number versus about a 215 expectation. So that's a little bit less on jobless,

initial jobless claims. That's a good thing. Existing claims were actually a little higher.

So people that are unemployed are staying that way for longer.

But generally speaking, the employment picture is still very positive. We had a existing home sales

number today that was quite a bit better than expected. It was 9.5% for the month at 4.44 houses. And that was

better than expected. And so you're continuing to see positive things in real estate and housing and support

for it.

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