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 is Tuesday, April the 15th, and you've done it and made it through tax filing deadline. So good job with that. I know we had a lot in our play at the Bonson Group, especially with TBG tax, working extra hours and making it all happen. So I'm very thankful for all the work that they did. But Brian Saitel with you here on a small giveback day in markets, but honestly not much. The Dow was down one-third of a percent,

S&P was down 15 bases points, NASDAQ was flat. So we had an up day yesterday and basically

a sideways slightly negative today. Ten-year treasury, not much changed, went down four basis points

at 433. So fairly benign day overall.

There was an upmarket actually in the morning.

We lost a little bit of traction when some of the negotiations between the EU and the U.S. on trade

seemed to have stalled or made less progress than otherwise would have been hoped for.

Other than that, though, it was just fine. On the economic calendar, we had U.S. import prices, and this is a funny headline because it's a little delayed. This is for March, but they were down one-tenth of a percent for March while they were up two-tenths of a percent the month before. And this is right when it's a little backward looking, in other words.

So Trump has come out with tariffs, which would, of course, affect input prices. And they were down in

March, coincidentally, to start this off. We also had a manufacturing index. This is the New York

Fed Empire State Manufacturing Index. Was better than expected, although still negative. but we were expecting a negative 14.5.

We got negative 8 for the month of April. So some pretty positive things on manufacturing

there. There were comments in there really about the dollar in bonds. And the headlines really

grab a hold of this stuff. I had just literally got off a phone call with a great client of mine and friend

about the same subject. When you're looking at the dollar being down small amount or fixed

income being down and yields up, now those two things are usually reverse correlated. So as rates

go up, usually currencies get stronger, not weaker. So there's some anomalies happening there.

But number one, the moves really aren't that big. And then number two, the dollar's up a percent

here in two trading days. If you looked at a five-year chart of the dollar, it's actually still

higher. And if you looked at the 20 or 30-year chart, it essentially trades it sideways because

the rest of the world is pegging currency around it.

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