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

Welcome to Dividendin Cafe. This is Wednesday, August the 14th. Brian Saitel with you here from our beautiful new West Palm Beach office in Florida.

Coming to you with a nice little update in markets following yesterdays.

So some follow-through, we had the Dow close up 242 points on the day.

The S&P was up about a third of a percent, a little more.

The NASDAQ was about flat.

And the 10-year bond yield was down

just a basis point. We closed at 384 on the 10-year yield. Follow-through day, fairly positive. And some

of the reason behind that was the new read on inflation. We got CPI data out today, which was largely

in line, although just slightly better than expected, meaning a little bit

lower. For the month, we had a 0.2% increase for July for headline CPI, which puts year over

year just below the 3% estimate at 2.9%. Headline, a little bit better than expected year over

year, right in line on the month. And then

core, if you strip out things like food and energy, was right in line with expectations at 0.2%

for the month and is now 3.2% year over year. So this is basically what the market wanted to see.

It's followed through on a disinflationary narrative. The Fed futures are still pointing to a rate cut in September, basically with 100%

of surety.

It is now about a 62% chance of a 25 basis point cut and a 38% chance of a 50.

So as of now, my read on this is that they probably will do 25 basis points, at least as of today.

As far as will they or won't they, we have a good amount of data before then to go through.

So it's hard to really say, and these numbers will change. I would take the under on the inflation

expectations, though. And my guess is they'll end up with 25 for September, but we'll see and keep you posted.

...