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

Welcome to Dividend Cafe this Thursday, March the 26th, Brian Saitel with you from our West Palm Beach, Florida office, still here all week. And we had a give-back day

in markets. We've got a decent sell-off here. I'm actually recording this slightly before the

close, but the market has been trailing lower for the entire trading day. We're down a little over

400 points on the Dow, about a percent and a half on the

S&P and about two on the NASDAQ. So this is another big rotation day. You're saying the selloff

and AI related names, specifically social media type of tech companies, and much more outperformance,

specifically in energy, obviously, and in some of the staples. And you've got a decent move up in oil.

Brent and WTI are both up over 4% on the day. And this is about U.S. and Iran ongoing and

negotiations that either are or aren't happening in progress that either is or isn't being made.

But what it's doing is sending oil prices back higher.

There's still a closure in the Strait of Hormuz, and it's disrupting energy transport, but it's

also disrupting things like helium transport. And I wrote about this a week ago, but technically

27% of the world's helium goes through there as well. And when you think about countries like Taiwan,

where the largest semiconductor and chip foundry exists in the world, they use helium to cool

down the chips as they build them. And it's specific to that purpose and it's necessary.

And Taiwan gets about 69% of its helium through the Strait of Hormuz.

So as of now, there isn't a chip shortage and there isn't necessarily a disruption.

There has been a move higher in pricing.

But as this goes on farther, there's also that risk as well.

And if you think about the world needing oil, I would definitely put that above new chips,

but chips are right up on the

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