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 the Monday edition of the Dividend Cafe.

It's a quick and easy one this week, actually, partially because there isn't the melodrama that we had a week ago.

And in fact, markets were quite boring.

The S&P 500 today was up 0.00%.

I think many of we don't have that happen very often.

But also, I would say that there just was like a little

bit of information I wanted to pass on this week in each category, but not a lot or in excess in any

one category. So let me pull up a few things here and we'll get into it. I want to start just by

talking about

the day that we had with the Dow was down 140 points. The S&P was dead even. NASDAQ was up

20 basis points. The Dow had gone down right at the open a little over 200 points and then it

really did zig and zag throughout the day. But again, a pretty benign day

all around in markets, not a lot to report coming off of the big rally day that it happened Thursday

and Friday of last week. A lot more breadth in the Thursday rally last week, meaning wider participation

in the market than there was Friday.

But still, nothing changes in the fact that you had a big sell-off at the beginning of the week that by

the end of the week had been neutralized. And so do with that what you please. And then today,

another microcosm of kind of a boring day. Now, technology was the leading performing sector today.

Energy was second. The worst performing was real estate, but it was only down 60 basis points.

The bond market was positive again. The yield was down three basis points, the tenure, back to 3.9%. One of the things that I will say,

just based on the context of what we talked about a week ago, was that speculative shorts in the

...