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 DC Today. I'm Trevor Cummings, filling in for David Bonson. He is in the greatest city in the world. He's in New York City running around today, so I said I'd fill in for him. He'll be back tomorrow, though, with his special long-form dividend cafe. I'd encourage you to not miss it. And what is everyone talking about right now? The debt ceiling. If you're talking to somebody in finance, they are shaking their head and pulling their hair out.

Like, why are we talking about this? It will get resolved. Yet, it's the headlines everywhere.

So Kevin McCarthy said some positive sentiment towards it getting resolved. So markets took off.

Markets were up two days in a row. You saw the NASDAQ did a lot better than the Dow and S&P. Why? Because it was led by the

technology sector. The specifics were the Dow was up 115 points. That's 0.34%. The S&P was up

0.94% NASDAQ up 1.51%. Like I said, the technology sector led the way, which was up 2.06% on the day. Real estate,

the worst performance sector, was down 0.68%. And oil was at $72.6 a barrel, which was down

1.15%. So it gives you the daily happenings in the market. Some of the news, which was all basically

muted by anybody's interest in what's going on the debt ceiling, but you did have

existing or new home sale, or sorry, existing home sales published today. It was above

estimation. You had the unemployment numbers, which I'll

pause there. The unemployment numbers were kind of interesting. We started January unemployment

claims around 200,000. You saw a little bit of spike, but then you had news come out saying that

Massachusetts, which seemed off the charts with where their claims were, had a lot of fraudulent

claims. And if you know anything about data, it's garbage in, garbage out. So what they looked

at is to see, hey, can they resolve some of those fraudulent claims? You saw just the unemployment

claims in Massachusetts go from somewhere in the range of 35,000 down to 20,000. So almost cut in half.

Still, more claims than New York and Texas. And you can do the math. There's a lot more people in

New York and Texas than Massachusetts. So those claims came in at 242,000. Last week, that was 264,000. Yes, above that 200,000 abnormally low threshold we set in

January, but still not a lot of labor concerns out there. In other data points, you had the

Philadelphia Fed Factory survey came out, reported a negative reporting, which that's nine

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