Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Welcome to Dividend Cafe this Thursday, April the 25th for your daily market recap.

Quite a down day today. The Dow actually closed lower by 375

points, although we were down over 700 points earlier about mid-morning. So we actually made back a

little. We regained a bit from the sell-off. The S&P and the NASDAQ were both down, you know, half of a percentage point, roughly, something like that.

So the Dow actually was down a little more, almost 1% on the day.

The best performing sector was material, still having a positive return sort of in the commodity complex, really.

It was at 0.69%.

Communication services had a big down day.

Again, there's a lot of earnings coming out right now, so a lot of this stuff matters, but it was down

about 4% on the day almost. So a decent down day in markets. The 10-year yield on the treasury

closed at 4.70. That was up five basis points on the day and is right about the

high here for the year. So we're creeping up on rates. And the reason for all this in the

economic news was that we got the first read of real GDP and Q1. So this nets out inflation, and it was a little weaker than expected.

We got 1.6% growth for the U.S. economy versus a 2.2% number expected.

And again, actually, believe this or not, but the number being a little lower than expected,

I think initially wasn't a bad

thing because again, we want to see things slowing a little bit for the Fed to start to move on

rates. But the reason the market sold off was that inside of the number, the GDP deflater,

was quite higher than expected, meaning that the inflation numbers that we looked at today

that caused that

number, the GDP number to be lower, are what drove markets lower.

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