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 is Thursday, November the 21st. And Brian Saitel with you on a very pretty positive day overall in the equity markets.

The Dow ended up closing up 461 points.

We've been in this consolidating sideways move here for over a week now, an up-down movement in markets.

So we broke through a little today and resumed our move higher for the month of November.

The S&P was up about a half a percent also on the day, and the NASDAQ was essentially flat.

A lot of that was tech earnings-related companies coming out there. But bonds sold up just a small

amount. We went up about a basis point on 10 years. Treasury is closed to 442.

So there's your market wrap. On the economics side of things, we had initial claims actually come

out much better than expected. We got a 213,000 print for the week. We thought it would be 220.

So that's better with less people filing for unemployment, although it is interesting

to see that the continuing claims continue to edge higher, not just this week, but the past

four weeks, month over month. And so we're seeing people that are on unemployment stay that way

for a little longer in this labor market. But it's still very resilient overall. The labor market is in

very, very good shape still. The Philly Fed Manufacturing Index contracted for the month, which was

unexpected. Last month, we had a pretty positive number, and that's off of the New York Empire State

Index that was expansionary as well. So that was a little, but if a mess on manufacturing,

and then we had existing home sales that were beating expectations, they were at 3.5%

for the month, 3.4. So there you go on the economic side in your market recap. What I wrote in there

is more about expectations. I know we're entering a holiday week. I believe that it will slow down is my guess in markets as earnings kind of finish. And we head into a shortened holiday week next week. But expectations on the S&P, most sell side analysts, not all, some of them are in the 6,500 range, some of them in the 7,000 range. But on average, if you call it around 6,700 on the

S&P, we're close today at 5948. So if you think about earnings at the end of 2024, ending the year

somewhere around 245 a share, that puts us about 24 times earnings current. And if you think about

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