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 Tuesday, January the 27th. Brian Saitel with you here on a bit of a mixed bag day in markets overall. You had the Dow down on the day,

significantly over 400 points. You had the S&P that was positive by about a half a percent.

NASDAQ was up about a percent. So you had more the opposite of rotation. You actually had small

caps underperform and you had an outperformance and some of the

tech names. You've got a lot of the Mag 7 names starting to report this week. There was also a large

AI deal. And then on the Dow, which you had is a very large healthcare name down significantly,

call it 20% that dragged the index overall down. And this was on an executive order or statement from the Trump administration on Medicare

payments and the growth of them being stagnant versus rising, which is what was priced into

that particular stock.

Bonds, a little changed on the day, 10 years at 423.

The dollar was down slightly about a percent.

And then he had silver that was actually down 8%. So this has been a

heck of a roller coaster for everybody that's been watching it. It's quite literally up and down

five to 10 percent in a day. Some of that is what we've called short covering rally in a commodity

constrained, supply constrained, precious metal market like silver is getting the best of it from a

volatility standpoint. The Richmond Fed Index in January came out below consensus measured here on economic activity

essentially, so cooler than expected. And then we had consumer confidence. This is a number we don't

tend to pay a lot of attention to at the Bonson Group, but it is a barometer of expectations

in how people feel about markets. The reason we don't tend to look at it quite as much as it just tends to be a little lagging and is what people have just gone through versus ultimately what they will do in the future, number one, and the number two, they can say things in a survey all they want, but we can just look at consumer spending and get a sense of if people feel confident or not, and they

would vote with their pocketbooks. So if they're out buying stuff and spending, it means that they're

pretty confident in their ability to afford those things. And I would tend to look at those numbers a

...