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

Welcome back to Dividend Cafe this Thursday, January 29th. Brian Saitel is back with you here on a mostly down day, although somewhat mixed.

At the end of the trading day, we actually

had the Dow pop into positive territory by 55 points. So we had a little green on the screen,

big rotation day. This is a lot of growth selling off on the day and then some of the value names

and a lot of the defensives in the market rallying a little bit, especially towards the close of the

session. And on the interest rates, we lost a basis point on 10. So really, rates have pretty much been a very tight range here. We're at about 423 on the 10-year treasury yield. Yesterday, like I said, we got some news from the FedA, and so there's some more volatility in some of the precious metals markets. I've written about this a few times. We've spoken about it. And we've had some dollar weakness this year, but that doesn't attribute the basically parabolic move that we've seen in both gold and silver. Today, you had intraday moves of almost 10% in both of those. So if you're coming into this as a retail investor, trying to buy something that has gone up a lot just for the

sake of it or you're some of these traders that are getting their face ripped off here the last week

or so I feel for you these things are tough there's a lot of money out there chasing a pretty

finite supply of these things and price movement has been very volatile here last couple of days

including today like I said said, yesterday Fed held

rates the same today. They're dissecting some of the comments on the press conference, but it was

mostly pretty good comments about the economy being solid and labor hanging in there. And so Fed futures

are now at about 44 basis points coming off of Fed funds by the end of the year. But just remember, we've got May 15th

is when Powell's term as the chair. He can stay on as a governor all the way through 2028 or up until

2028. But his term as the Fed chair actually ends here in a couple of months, as we've spoken about,

the Trump administration needs to nominate a new person. And this new run-up

in what I originally called the Black Horse in that race, which was Rick Ryder from Black Rock,

his betting odds have now jumped up here quite a bit just with some media catching headlines and

things. But I really don't think that's all that realistic just because of political partisanship

and him leaning more left and many other qualitative factors for the job itself. But you've got

folks in there like Warsh, Waller, both of those are very viable candidates and sensible. I believe

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