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

Welcome the Dividend Cafe. This is Wednesday, October 30th.

Brian Saitel with you here from our West Palm Beach, Florida office.

Slightly down day in markets.

We actually were up, at least on the Dow, mid-morning about 200 points and gave a lot of that back throughout the trading day.

There was a good amount of earnings that had come out today, but on the economic side, there was ADP private payroll number that came out. We were expecting

113. We ended up with 233 on new private payroll gains. The non-farm payroll report and

unemployment rate on Friday will be more telling than the private report today. But still,

it was quite a bit better. Interest rates were lower before the report.

They actually moved just a little higher afterwards. We ended up closing up three basis points

on the tenure at 430, which seems to be the point, by the way, in which markets are paying a

little bit more attention. I know we wrote about this, or David did, about the 450 mark being

that market sell-off point potentially

if rates got up that high, which isn't very far from here. And I agree completely. I still think

there's some jitters that start around the 430 level. At least that's what I've noticed the last

couple of trading days. So keep that in mind. Tomorrow we will have a PCE inflation read, which is very heavily watched by the Fed,

and so that can move things a little bit, and then, of course, employment on Friday.

So more data coming to you down the pike.

Today, we also had a preliminary read on third quarter GDP,

and we were expecting 2.6, we got 2.8.

So GDP, at least the first glimpse of it for Q3, came out stronger than expected by 0.2.

Inside of that, no shocker here, but inside of that the reason was consumer spending was a little bit better than expected on that front.

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