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 and welcome to the Wednesday edition of DC Today. We are over the halfway point of this week. And it was another odd day in

markets. I want to give you a little breakdown and a couple comments on some of the economic

data that has come through. First and foremost, just in terms of what happened today in the

markets.

The Dow closed up 39 points, but it had been down about not quite 250.

And so around halfway through the day, it sort of hit a lower point and then rebounded off of that,

then kind of zigged and zagged in the last hour and a half and closed near the

high of the day, like I said, up just about 40 points. But from its low of the day, up nearly 300.

The S&P was up 0.28% and the NASDAQ was up almost 1%, not quite. So continued rally and all that stuff. The tenure, the yield went

up four and a half basis points to 3.8%. And the top sectors today were communication services

and consumer discretionary, both up exactly 1.16%.

Energy was the worst performing sector, down 1.78%.

Crude oil itself closed still at 78.5.

And so we're talking about down 0.7%.

So in terms of some of the inputs today into markets, the retail sales

were up 3% in January, far more than expected, almost double. Now, that includes things like

grocery and gas stations and whatnot. And so core retail sales where you take out

some of that food beverage and energy were up 1.7% of the month, which was still about 70%

better than the 1% that have been expected. The main thing that I don't know what to say about is that department stores

were exponentially higher. Their percentage month-over-month growth was massive, and I don't

have the foggiest idea why that may have been. But it certainly was a very strong retail number, and some might call it a non-recessionary

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