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 Tuesday, February the 10th, Brian Saitel with you.

Here on a mixed day, overall in markets, the Dow actually did squeak out a small gain of

about 10 basis points, but the SMP and the NASDAQ were both down. S&P was down a third of a percent.

NASDAQ was down two-thirds of a percent, and actually small caps were also down about that much

as well. Decent sell-off in stocks, although we closed off of the worst levels. Continued

rotation, we saw the equal weight SMP 500 outpaced the cap weighted by about 70 basis points

on the day. And I would say the biggest move really in markets, it was more of the bond market.

He had rates come down pretty much across the board. So bonds rallied a tenure was down about six

bases points. We're at 414 now on the 10 year. So that's been 425, 430 for quite some time.

And at one point we were talking of it getting up to four and a half and now it's coming back

down the other way. Of course, we have a new Fed chair coming in, Kevin Warsh, and the thought is he will lower short-term interest rates, likely why he got the job to begin with, because that's a big priority for this administration.

But in the process, his goal is to reduce the maturity inside of the balance sheet and also reduce the aggregate level of the balance sheet.

It's at about $6.5 trillion now. So have that come down some. And then the trick of all of that

will be, of course, can you do that without disrupting the money market fund accounts and just

credit conditions and financial conditions along the way? There was a few pieces of economic

data out. You had the NFIB,

small businesses, optimism survey come out. This was below expectations. We were expecting

something 99.8 and we got 99.3. So it was a little bit below. So you've got some trepidation

going on with small business index reporters on that front. Obviously small businesses or two-thirds of this or more employment in the economy. So it's a big deal. But you also had some retail sales that were flat for December. It's a delayed report. So I'm not going to go into it a ton. Just because this is all the way February now, but we were expecting a four-tenth increase in December,

and we got a flat number. That's a pretty big miss. You talk about seasonality, the weather,

or government shutdown, all that stuff had a part of it. Nonetheless, that's your number.

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