Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Good evening and welcome in to Dividend Cafe. Brian Saitel here with you as your host,

here from our beautiful West Palm Beach, Florida office on Tuesday, April

the 7th. We had an update yesterday in markets, although really it was the lowest volume day of the

year. So there just wasn't a lot of news necessarily and certainly not much activity. We had more

geopolitical risk on the headlines. We've got a deadline between the U.S. and Iran on further damage to that country if the Strait of Hormuz isn't opened, and different rhetoric back and forth and markets are upside down because of it here. We've got markets that are down, call it 1%, pretty much across the board. And you've got 10-year yields up about two bases points with energy prices at least

on WTI up about 3%. Brent is up a little less than a percent. So some of this movement around

geopolitical headlines, this is the story that we've been talking about now for at least five weeks.

But I wanted to shift gears a little bit out of the war and start talking about

fundamentals. I touched on some of the low volume yesterday, which to me, since there's just a lack

of conviction on those kind of weak up days until we get through this, but the actual numbers inside

of what earnings are going to come out this quarter are still fairly robust. So if you look at

something like operating

margins, I remember talking and writing about this when they were 16% and then 17% in saying that

they were basically at all time highs at that point. They've now even moved higher in a forward basis.

And we're looking at about 19.7%. That's the highest that it's ever been in the history of the index, and it's

much higher than it was in the late 90s during that sort of productivity boom and tech era.

Nonetheless, those big margins are likely to have some pressure. Oil is such a big input cost

into all businesses in every form, and there's some margin pressure combined with some other

things that can cause them that delta to slow down. But it's unlikely that it would reverse back

all the way to a level that would be indicative of really declining corporate profits. And that

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