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

Welcome to Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel, your host for this evening on Tuesday, April the 28th. Mixed day at the close pretty much down across the board,

although we were off of the lows for the day. And this was one of those days where big bifurcation

and sector performance tech really sold off quite a bit more. The NASDAQ was down about nine-tenths of a percent, and the Dow was flat. S&P was down half a percent. So, an odd day there, mainly around AI concern and the sustainability of the CAPEX that has gone into that sector. The largest company in the space, Open AI, missed numbers and it was because

of a loss of market share to its largest competitors in Gemini and Anthropic. And we've spoken

about this for a very long time, about that being inevitable, that they can't all win together,

that there's going to be some that will compete with others and take market share back and

forth. It doesn't mean it has to be

a win-lose environment. There can be win-win, just not equally. So there's a natural sort of

component of market efficiency and also a normal way of how this competition is going to play out

over time. It's also a new technology, and so we don't actually know exactly how it will

reshape things. But that's the reason my tech sold off the most on the day. You ended up with

a 10-year flat and oil up a good amount. WTI was up about 3.7% on the day. So same story there.

You've got Middle East tension. U.S. Iran conflict isn't ending anytime soon. Strait of Hormuz still closed. So far, there hasn't been a very clear and good off ramp to it. And so oil is still trending high. You've got Brent over 104. You've got WTI right at 100. Yeah, at these levels, you're starting to shave real points off of GDP and slowing global growth.

But that story has been largely in place for some time. It's a good thing when you've got

divergence and performance based on competition inside of markets. Everything going up, the tide

rising and lifting all the boats at the same time can cause excesses and companies get just wildly overvalued.

I did point out the semiconductor space.

This isn't to say that it isn't important, arguably the most important, or one of them, sectors out there.

But just understand that semiconductor space alone, so not technology, just semis, are now 17% of the index.

So that's the same or getting darn close to all of the healthcare companies, all of the energy

companies, all of the staples companies, and also all of the utility companies combined.

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