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 Thursday, October the 16th.

And as always, Menwick, Brian Saitel is with you here on another mixed,

albeit modestly down day here in the market. We actually had the Dow close off of the lows,

but we still closed down 301 points. The SMP was down 6 tenths of a percent. Nasdaq was down

about 50 basis points on the day. The 10-year actually

closed below 4%. We got a 398 closed on the 10-year. It was down six basis points, which is a decent

move. Part of the reason you've seen interest rates come down here recently, and actually the

volatility index has started to rise quite a bit. We're back up to a VIX of 25. That's about the level

we saw in early May just coming off of the Liberation Day April that we went through earlier in the

year. Volatility had spiked up and it had started to fall, but we were still in the mid-20s in May,

and that's the level we're back up to. Part of the reason is there's been some reverberation

around a couple of larger bankruptcies that we've spoken about in dividends. that's the level we're back up to. Part of the reason is there's been some reverberation around

a couple of larger bankruptcies that we've spoken about in Dividend Cafe already. This has been

ongoing now for the last 30 days or so, but the connectedness to them in the financial markets.

And also, you've seen a couple of charge-offs today with a regional bank that was down about 10% on the day because of that charge-off on loan. So there's just been some kind of cracks in the dam in the financial sector a little bit, and that's causing some angst, and it's causing volatility to go up a little bit, and then conversely, interest rates to now come down a little bit. You also had on the economic calendar for the day, you had a fully fed manufacturing data number that was out much worse than expected with negative 12.8 versus a positive 10.

Those numbers are bit arbitrary, but the point is that it was worse, and it's interesting because yesterday we had that Empire State manufacturing number that was much better.

So a little bit of mixed bag here on manufacturing,

largely both on Philadelphia and Empire State yesterday, the employment side has been fine.

Some of the things that the market has been paying more attention to has been the prices

paid have been both higher on both of those things. And then, of course, the shipments and new

orders and things that they're tracking. But again, Philly Fed was worse than Empire State.

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