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

Welcome to Dividendin Cafe. It is Thursday, July the 25th. Brian Saitel with you here again today. And it was quite a volatile day really in markets. You had kind of morning weakness. The Dow was positive, but just hardly. It was up maybe 40 points. But both the NASDAQ and the S&P were quite lower on the day. And then those things tended to reverse around midday. You had a Dow that was up over 500 points and a NASDAQ and S&P that were also positive close to a percent, not quite on the day.

And then end of the afternoon, basically we just reverted to the morning action.

And yeah, Dow closed up about 81 points.

NASDAQ was down 0.9%.

S&P was down 0.5%.

So again, more rotation from some of the higher valuation

sectors of the markets like technology and communications and consumer discretionary into some

of those other sectors on the value side and frankly on the dividend growth side, which are

things like energy, industrials, financials, and some materials. Continued rotation on the day there.

We had interest rates up slightly, about three basis points on the day, closed up 425 on the 10-year.

We got some economic data today.

Preliminary GDP came out at 2.8%, which is far above consensus at about 1.9% for the quarter. So some pretty strong GDP

numbers for the quarter. These things can get revised up or down, of course. So take that for what

it is. It's preliminary first read. But that puts an annualized number at 3.1, and we were only

expecting 2.9. So some strong numbers on GDP basically led by consumption and then

some inventory build. So we'll see if there's revisions on those figures. Otherwise, it looks

quite good, really. Some initial jobless claims today were basically in line. They were actually

a little bit better. We came in at 235. We were expecting 239. And same thing on existing claims, more or less right in line. We got about 1.85 million on existing. So employment pinging in there, slightly cooler than it was, say six months ago, but still quite healthy. We had durable goods orders today that frankly disappointed for the month of June, they were down

6.6%, which is the lowest technically since the pandemic started in April of 2020. But when he

peeled back, and by the way, we were expecting about a half a percent increase, a negative

6 percent versus a 0.5 percent increase is a big difference on expectations. But if you strip out

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