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, welcome to the very first DC today of 2024. I do hope and trust you you and yours had a wonderful new year. I am back in the

country, although not back into the office. I have come out to my desert house with the intent

being to totally focus on our year behind year ahead white paper that will come out as

the Dividend Cafe on Monday, this coming Monday, which is January the 8th. So we're doing this

is sort of a special timing. Normally, obviously, we do Divida Cafe on Fridays. We need a little bit more time

than the shortened holiday week will give us with all of the reading, research, and writing

that goes into it, which is what I'm here to do this week. Then, of course, the editing and

design and layout and, you know, kind of the

production side that the team has to do to get it ready for, for publication. We just decided

to make Monday our release date. And I'm going to have Brian Sightel handle the DC Today load

for me tomorrow and Thursday, Wednesday and Thursday,

just so that I can be as focused as possible. The white paper we've been doing since I think,

oh, it's at least a few years before we left Morgan Stanley. So I think it's been 11, 12 years now.

And it's a monumental task.

And I want it to be something that's really valuable for you all.

I want it both in the podcast form, the video form,

but especially the written deliverable that we are going to put into a, you know,

printable PDF format.

There's a lot of content to summarize a lot of data,

a lot of perspective we want to offer and give people at this turn of a new year

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