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

Good evening and welcome back to Dividend Cafe. This is Tuesday, December the 9th. Brian Saitel with you here on a fresh week in our Newport Beach, California headquarters here at the Bonson Group.

And today was a bit of a down day in the stock market.

We had a down day in the bond market slightly as well, but marginally so.

The Dow ended up closing off on the day, 179 points, which these days equals about a third of a percent.

S&P was basically flat, and the

NASDAQ was slightly higher by about 13 basis points. So slightly higher on some tech stocks.

Everything else was marginally down. Bon market was slightly off yields on tens, dropped about two

basis points, so we're at 418. Basically, most things at least coming out right now are just

dependent on what's going to happen tomorrow. Not so much on the interest rate decision from the

FOMC because there's a 90% chance they're going to cut 25 basis points. So that's pretty priced

in. But the press conference afterwards is always where the fireworks are, and that's where

most people will be watching and paying attention to what they actually say about things. Remember,

the government was shut down for over a month, and so a lot of the data was delayed. A lot of it

really just became irrelevant as it's coming out. The fresh data that we're getting has been

somewhat mixed. We've seen both softness and strength in the labor market and similarly in some of the services and manufacturing reports as well. So there's a lot

to digest right now. And I know the market will be looking to what Powell says. Also, you've got a

replacement FOMC president coming in as well in May of next year. So there's a good amount going on the

interest rate side. I wrote about that, at least on the balance sheet, a little bit about that

last week. We closed essentially at the lows on the stock market and the only two pieces of data

that were out today. One of them was the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index. This is a survey that comes out, gives you a pulse at least on small businesses. Remember, that's a majority of the market in the U.S. A little bit higher than expected, so we've got a 99 number versus a 98 figure. What does that mean? Not much, frankly. Those things tend to be backward looking, in my opinion. So a lagging indicator versus versus a leading and just take it for what it's worth a period of time

really that it's responding to was a bit of a strange one I guess with

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