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 and welcome to the Thursday edition of DC today back in the New York City studio office.

Kind of interesting day in markets. It's going to be a short little report today.

You'll have a dividend cafe tomorrow as always Friday.

And the way I'd sum up kind of markets today is it was a little 2020-ish.

You had almost all of the defensive sectors up.

The leading sector on the day was utilities, which were up one and a quarter percent.

You had technology was the worst performing sector and it was down over one and a half percent and included in

positive territory were other sectors like real estate health care consumer staples,

things like that. The Dow ended up being up 57 points and the S&P was down a third of a

percentage point. The NASDAQ was down a third of a percentage point.

The NASDAQ was down almost 1%.

So you've had a little bit of a, and it isn't much yet,

but over a couple of days, a little bit of a 2022-like deal where Dow defenses,

this type of stuff, has done a bit better.

Still on the year, though, obviously, NASDAQ is up significantly.

There were some perhaps news interventions into markets.

I'm always very hesitant to say what caused a particular market activity because oftentimes what causes markets to do something is nothing whatsoever or nothing definable or provable or measurable whatsoever.

But I do suspect that the reports that have come out, which are not really totally clear or specific or verified,

nevertheless, I put a link to the kind of major report from Bloomberg in D.C. today, today,

about the Chinese government potentially banning or further restricting government employees from having iPhones. And so there's

not just the impact it could have to Apple, but it just does seem to be a form of escalation and

...