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 D.C. today on Tuesday, January 24th. My name is Brian Saitel, and it's great to be with

you all as I kind of go through today's market and give you a couple of takeaways.

But we opened, let's see, last night we had a positive day, a nice positive day on Monday

in markets, and futures sort of opened flat. I'd say we were

up and down 20 points for, I don't know, several hours until early morning, something like that.

And then markets sort of sold off, most likely because of Europe. We pointed to a down 150 open.

We opened down 170. So, you know, right off the bat was down and we actually traded lower. We

were down something like 250 points within the first 20 minutes of trading.

And although that was sort of the low and we kind of regained a little bit from there,

we had some PMI data that came out around 1145 or so that helped markets recovering.

We sort of recovered from there and then kind of traded sideways for most of the day,

closing just slightly positive on the Dow and then a little bit negative on the S&P and NASDAQ with more technology. A heavy weighted index is in there. So kind of a quiet day in markets, but some good data that we get to go through here. And I'll walk through it with you a little bit. We've had, so the PMI data that came out today, you know, we've been talking about inflation forever.

And so that's sort of been the narrative. It's when is inflation going to roll over. And we definitely have seen that at this point. And I'll even call it, I believe it that we've seen peak inflation here in this cycle. And inflation has been rolling over. And so now we're getting data points, for example, like a services number or manufacturing number that we got today, both showing

contractionary readings. We got, I think, PMI on manufacturing. Both were slightly better than

expected following December, which was quite negative. So anything below 50 is contracting.

Manufacturing was 46.8 versus 46.6.6 from the prior

month. And then services, 46.6 from 44.7. So yeah, right around that time, you saw markets recover.

And the reason is that, you know, those numbers could have been worse. And so you could have shown

markets really kind of accelerating to the downside, declining more and actually speaking more to recession. And you didn't really get that. You got a little bit of recovery, but still showing contractionary, but sort of the porridge was just right, which is that it's negative, but not too negative and a little bit better than last month. And then it kind of speaks to the Fed being able to pause or kind of stop or slow, at least their rate hikes, if you believe in that narrative, which we do here in the remainder of the year. So that was good news. Markets tend to recover a little bit from there. And then we just sort of closed, like I said, a little bit mixed on the day. We are right in the middle of earning season. 67% of companies have

reported better than expected this season so far, which is, which is good. It's lower than what

we've seen in the last couple of earnings seasons, which is more like 70 and 80%. High 70s, low 80s

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