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, August the 15th.

Brian Sightel with you here from Palm Beach, Florida, in what was really a nice day in markets,

the Dow is up over 500 points on the day, 522 roughly. Both the S&P and the NASDAG

notched their sixth straight session of up days in a row. And the bond market sold off here a little

bit. We were down about 10 basis points on the 10-year yield. So the reason for

the rally and risk assets and the sell-off and some bond prices was aside from the PPI number

on Wednesday and also the CPI number, we're both cooler than expected on inflation. We got some

stronger than expected growth numbers today, at least on the consumer

side. July retail sales were up 1%. We only thought there would be about a 0.3% increase.

Some of this is some rebound, at least in the auto sector, which was the biggest attribution

for the number. There was a cyber attack last month that caused some of those sales

to bleed into the following the month. And so take that for what it is. But nonetheless,

July retail sales were robust and that speaks to a strong consumer. And that fueled some of the

markets today on the rally side. We had initial jobless claims that came in at 227. We were expecting 233, so a little bit

better on unemployment, and also continuing claims were a little bit better than expected.

So again, there was some fears allayed, at least on the growth side of the equation.

Now that we've seen the inflation side continue down that disinflationary

narrative. There was a couple of pieces outside of that good news, I guess, which was we had the

Philly Fed Index, the Empire State Index, and an NHB Home Builder Sentiment number that were all

weaker than expected on the day. But some of that stuff just really

gets overshadowed. I mean, what the market is looking at is what's driving the Federal Reserve,

...