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

Welcome back in to Dividend Cafe this Thursday, October the 23rd, Brian Saitel with you from our West Palm Beach, Florida office.

On a modestly update here in markets,

we had the Dow up a third of a percent. SMP ended up about six-tenths of a percent,

and NASDAQ ended up about nine-tenths of a percent. And that was off of what was earlier

some volatility in the morning because the U.S. increased significantly so, some sanctions on two of the

largest oil companies out of Russia in a demand of a ceasefire in Ukraine. And on top of that,

you also had the EU ban LNG imports from Russia as well. So all of this stuff is really designed

to cripple the funding mechanism

for Putin's war machine in Russia against Ukraine. And we had volatility in the energy markets

pretty much across the board, although like I said, stocks ended up closing higher on the day.

You had Brent WTI both up on the day. WTI was actually up a little over 5%. That said,

and my comment on this is that that's a good move for oil, although it's a commodity and it's volatile,

so it's not really all that much, frankly. The other thing is it's one thing when you've got oil

starting in the mid-50s to be up 5% that it is oil

in the 70s or 60s or 80s, you know, a much higher level to be at 5%. In other words, $61 WTI just

frankly isn't all that much. So pretty muted overall in the energy landscape. But that

sent some reverberations through the market. The yields were actually higher.

We had the 10-year-up five basis points. We're now at four even on tens. So some volatility around

energy markets largely with that news today on sanctions on these two large Russian oil companies.

There was a good question in there today about China's apparent selling of U.S.

treasuries and buying gold and then apparently trying to convince the other BRCA nations to do the

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