Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to what I guess is more like the official first DC today where we're doing the podcast.

We did it yesterday, but first of all, we had some audio

challenges, but second of all, it was still with the long form written DC today, and it was actually

a particularly long DC today. So now we've started this new program, and I'm coming to you

today with a podcast, and in your inbox, you've also received a

written kind of summary of the market and an ask David and some of those things. And of course,

on the first day we decide to do this, you have the worst day in the markets since summer of

2020. It's over two years. I think it's about 27 months, and I didn't look at it across

each index, but at least that's the case with the Dow. So I want to be able to kind of address

to you a few things that happen. I'm going to keep my readers nearby to go to the screen with

some data points, but let me do this normally here, so I don't have my eyes go out on me.

Look, initially, the futures were up this morning about 200 points and the Dow has been up about

1,500 points or something in the last 10 days.

And you then had the futures go from plus 200 to minus 300 in a matter of minutes this morning.

So that immediately tells you that there was some positioning that got real throttled by

the CPI report.

Now, the headline number, when you say, okay, CPI was up 8.3% and we were expecting

it as year over a year, and we were expecting it to be up 8.1%, you don't really think that that's

going to cause a 1,300 point drop in the markets. And this is the thing I cannot explain

emphatically enough.

It was not merely today in the selling pressure that people were so distraught by the CPI being 0.2% higher than projected.

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