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.

Good evening and welcome to D.C. today. Brian Saitel here with you, it's February 22nd, which is Wednesday. And I'll

kind of kick us off here and go through the market on the day, which was quite a bit

less volatile than yesterday, which I'll take. And I'll kind of go through. We ended up closing

down a little over 80 points on the day, although for most

of the day, the market was up probably 50 points. It was just kind of a quiet day. We were basically

with a kind of a lull in economic activity, really just waiting to see what the Federal Reserve

minutes were going to reveal from their last meeting,

which is now a full three weeks old from February 1st and kind of what they discussed.

And we know that they raised rates 25 basis points, but the market was really just sort of

in a holding pattern until that data was released, which is around 2 o'clock or so Eastern.

So we closed slightly lower,

meaning that we lost a little ground following the minutes

and I'll sort of go in to them and go through them.

The S&P was down fractionally 0.16%.

The NASDAQ actually closed positive,

which was the first day in four

that eeked out a little bit

of a gain of about 0.13%. Rates came down a little bit today. They were up significantly,

like I mentioned yesterday, came off a little bit. The 10-year closed at 393, which was down a couple

basis points on the day. And pretty much across the curve,

we traded either a little sideways

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