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, welcome to D.C. today, my first time here with you, at least in 2024 in the new year. It's Wednesday, January the 3rd, and I'm here with you in Newport Beach Office Studio.

So another down day in markets, all of two, I guess, so far in the new year.

And I don't know that that necessarily makes any sort of trend.

And frankly, with, you know, having a nine-week run-up of, call it 15 plus percent

in S&Ps, getting a couple of days of some consolidation. It's healthy. It's normal. Frankly,

you know, it's welcome as far as I'm concerned. I'm putting money to work every day. And so having

some normalcy in how markets

trade versus just a one-way ticket is appreciated technically, even though it's a down day. Tens were

slightly lower today. We had two bases point move. We closed at 391. So largely unchanged there.

We flirted actually with 4% intraday.

So we got a little move above 4, just touched 4, and then kind of came back down.

There was some inline numbers that came out.

We had ISM that came out at 47.2, which was just a little bit above what we were expecting at 47, sorry,

came out 47.4, we're expecting 47.2. So about inline. So it's still contractionary. So it's saying

some of that manufacturing data is just a little bit below what would be expansionary

inside of a growing economy, but largely in line.

We had job openings today that were also largely in line, but actually a little bit better.

We're running at about $8.8 million at this point, which while it's the lowest that we've seen

in a couple years, we call it three years. It is still very healthy.

The labor market is still holding its own just fine. We had a high of around 12 million.

That was in 2022, beginning of 22. So you can kind of see that post-COVID anomaly just go through

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