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 is Thursday, July the 10th. Brian Saitel with you here on a generally positive day overall in markets.

So what we've got basically two down days of Monday and Tuesday and now two up days of Wednesday and Thursday to head into the quieter week here and weekend, at least on the economic calendar.

But today the Dow Jones was up 192 points.

S&P was up a quarter of a percent.

NASDAQ was up marginally, a little above flat on the day.

Ten year was almost even up about a basis point to be closed at 435.

So there's your market movement. Economic calendar was fairly quiet.

We had initial jobless claims that came out at 227. Consensus was for 238, so that's better than expected.

You still have continuing claims that are edging a little higher. They actually beat consensus, by the way, but they were still tracking levels on the higher end since we've seen since 2021. So continuing claims are a little

sticky there, but initial job list claims overall fairly good. We're going to have bigger news

on both CPI coming out on Tuesday, and then really we just kick into earnings season, which is

really the focus of what I wrote about today, because I think fundamentals coming

back into focus is frankly just refreshing. We've been talking about geopolitical issues with Israel and

Iran. We've been talking about tariff issues with different political machinations back and forth

between the U.S. and trade policy. We've been talking about what's going to come through Congress on this big, beautiful bill, and all these sorts of things. And what hasn't been spoken about as much is just, hey, what are earnings, where are markets trading, what does sentiment look like, and how our earnings are going to come out here going forward, and what's guidance going to be for Q3 and to Q4? Those are the things that are more important to me. They just haven't been front and center, so it's nice to see them come back here. I mean, we've got basically markets at all-time highs. We didn't close at the highest for the day, but we were pretty darn close to them. And what we've seen really is volatility just come all the way back down to levels that are quite calm, call it 16 on the VIX,

is a pretty good market usually, volatility meaning pretty low. But you still have extreme bullish

sentiment in both the metals like gold and silver and shockingly. And I think that those that

follow those precious metals, especially those that have owned them for the last 10, 15 or 20 years that have been patient are still very positive on them.

But they've traded off the highs by quite a bit.

The bearishness on the U.S. dollar is at all-time highs, essentially.

And I think all those things are a little overdone.

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