Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends

in your understanding of economic life. Well, hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe. I am very excited as

we get ready to go into a kind of longer weekend. We have Independence Day next week.

And yet we are here at the halfway point of 2023. And so I'm recording on Friday, June 30th.

And markets up a decent amount here this morning. Anything could change between now and the end of the day.

But I can't give you like the exact number as to where markets close. So we'll have a kind of follow on, you know, real comprehensive

first half with all the final final numbers. But I wrote the Dividendon Cafe yesterday and Thursday.

I'm recording right now on Friday. And that always leaves you with just a little bit of tracking

areas to where

things can come. But what I am going to do is just thematically, use our Dividing Cafe today to talk

about the kind of surprises in the first half of the year, expectations going into the second half of the

year, and all that kind of stuff. So hopefully this little midway point,

the sort of halftime update will be useful.

The surprises of the year are a little different than some of the things that I'm

going to be talking about as big stories of the year. Because I think

that with surprises, I'm specifically referring to things that either did happen but didn't have

the response we would have expected or didn't happen when we thought they would have, that type of

a thing. And I don't just mean we like surprises for my

idiosyncratic or contrarian predictions, but I mean across the market, the sort of consensus

things that were still somewhat of a surprise. I'm going to start that list here. There will be

three things I just want to quickly kind of say I consider to be pretty

surprising in the first half of the year was the incredibly underwhelming economic output

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