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 DC today this Wednesday, March the 13th. And it's great to be with you here on a somewhat quiet day, really, in markets.

We had a nice upday yesterday. Really, it was a technology rally yesterday. And we gave a little bit of

that back, at least on a relative sector basis. Technology was down about a percent or so on the day.

The NASDAQ itself was down about 0.54%, about half of a percent.

For the day, the Dow still eeked out a gain of about 37 points.

It's a little bit mixed on the day, which is normal.

There wasn't a ton of economic news today.

I wrote about that yesterday.

Today was sort of a quiet calendar in the

economic front, but there's plenty to go through tomorrow. And there's still plenty today,

really, just not economic numbers, which some of you may like and some of you may may not.

The WTI was up to almost 3% today, a little less, 2.8% on a Ukrainian strike on a Russian refinery.

Rossneft that caused some turmoil and energy markets a little bit.

And then you had a drawdown from the government on inventories in the U.S. of about a million and a half barrels.

So WTI was up.

Both of those things take supply off

offline or indicative of supply being utilized. And so oil prices rallied a little bit on the day.

There has been a lot of talk really about the amount of cash that's on the sidelines and there's

been a lot of media about it. And, you know, there's about 18 plus trillion dollars sitting in cash a lot of that came

because of higher interest rates people looking for cash as an actual asset class that gives you

a positive real rate of return which is which is nice for a change after many years of it otherwise

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