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 Wednesday, the first day of May.

And we had kind of a mixed close on the market for the day. We were actually

up about 480, 500 points at the high of the day. We ended up closing basically mixed. The

Dow closed up 87 points on the day. The NASDAQ and the S&P were both down by about a third of a

percent. Big news on the day was that

the FOMC meeting ended today, and Powell left rates unchanged, which was largely telegraphed

and expected. He did actually lower or decrease the monthly cap of treasuries that is running off of the Fed's balance sheet and what is quantitative tightening from $60 billion on treasuries down to $25.

So he reduced the rate, we'll call it QT light, and the agencies that are running off at $15 billion will just continue.

And again, they want to have a balance sheet that is just treasuries without, you know, agency

mortgages in there.

So that's sort of the pace there where they're slowing it down a little bit.

Most of the presser afterwards, you know, he did get asked if it was possible to have a rate hike at some point.

There was a couple of people out there, Fed presidents mentioning that, you know,

could be on the table.

And he took that off of the table for any of those that were worried about that.

We were not worried about that.

But so that's off of the table.

By and large, it was slightly less hawkish than it could have been.

You know, yesterday we had our big drawdown day in markets. And again, today I started out,

or we started out as a rally that just sort of fizzled towards the end of the day. The economic

news on the day was the ISM manufacturing slightly disappointed. It was at 49.2. Remember, anything

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