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

Welcome back into Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel here, your midweek host on Tuesday, July the 14th, on somewhat of a mixed day, although biases to the

upside. We actually close positive. Dow is up about 45 points, S&P, up about four-tenths, and NASDAQ

up just under a percent, about 95 basis points on the day. So positive across the board,

you did have some different earnings come out,

particularly in some of the large banks and the financials. Largely, they were good. Most of that

sector was really up today, so there was a financial sector rally pretty much across the board. Some of the

bank earnings were a little mixed, so I wouldn't call them knocking it out of the park necessarily,

but stocks were up and that

tells you enough of what the markets thought about it.

Other than that, we had increase in kinetic energy back and forth in Middle East last

night.

And so oil was up a little bit on the day.

You had WTI up a little under 2%, and also some just rise in volatility around the back and forth

around the Strait of Hormuz.

That said, what the big news really was a drop in CPI on core.

This is the most important part of it, because we know headline includes food and energy,

and we know energy has been quite volatile since February when this thing started

in the Middle East. So when you move that out, what we saw last month was a rise in in core,

and that's not a good thing as far as where Fed funds has to go. This time around, we got headline

that actually moved 0.4% lower on the month. So it was a decline. That was better than expected

for a decline of 0.1%, which is what consensus had. Obviously, that was much better than the

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