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

Welcome back to Dividend Cafe. This is Thursday, August the 21st.

Brian Sightel with you here on a modestly down day, All of the indices were basically down about a third of a percent. Not a huge move. Bonds actually sold off a little bit as well. And yields were up on the 10 year, about four bases points on the day. We closed at 433. So a little bit of a sell off. There was a good amount of economic data that came out today, and I'll go through that. There's been actually a dearth of data the last two days. And then tomorrow we're going to get into the Jackson Hole speech with Chairman Powell speaking on policy and potentially hinting at what they're going to do in September. So that's what markets are really looking at. On the day, though, you had the jobless claims number a little higher than expected. We got a 235 print. We were expecting about 225. So that's inching a little higher. After last month's non-form payroll report, these things are being paid attention to a little bit more. And this coming out the very day before there's a speech.

I don't think any speech writer is changing the verbiage inside of the speech.

But nonetheless, these things are going to be looked at every week as they head into the next meeting in September, which is on the 16th, 17th.

You also had the Philly Fed Manufacturing Survey out today for August, and we were down 0.2% I'm sorry,

0.2 versus a 7 expected arbitrary numbers. Just put it in context. The manufacturing number missed

in the region of that area there. And so you're getting some kind of fits and starts,

like a little bit with manufacturing. For the most part, I'd say it's turned up,

but you get a negative number like that today in a large manufacturing region. We had some flash services number in PMIs that were actually better than expected. We got a 55.4 versus a 55 flat for the month of August.

Anything above 50s expansion area, remember. So that's good

on the services side. They also have the same flash number. Again, these are both from S&P on the

manufacturing PMI number for August. That was at 53.3 versus 49.5. A beat on PMIs, that flash

number isn't the permanent number. It gets revised. but a pretty good glimpse nonetheless there and again, both expansion territory, so that's good.

I wrote yesterday about housing more on the permit side and they look forward, but actually the new home sales earlier in the week and then now existing home sales today were better than expected.

We had a little

over 4 million. We're expecting more like a 3.9 number. So that's better than expected there on

home sales and it's good to see some inventories start to move a little bit. Again, it's built up

to five-month highs here. The last thing in the economic side, we had a U.S. leading economic

indicator that were basically in line.

They actually were down a tenth, but that was what was expected for the month of July.

So across the board, I'd call that more good than bad.

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