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

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Welcome back to Dividend Cafe. This is Tuesday, July the 15th. Brian Saitel with you

here today on a bit of a down day in markets, although somewhat mixed,

we had bonds sell-off and price, so we had yields up, tenure was up, five basis points,

and some of this movement was on an inflation read with CPI today that I'll get into in just a second.

But on the broad indices, the Dow was down 436 points, which these days equates

for a little less than 1%. SMP was down for tenths of a percent. Nasdaq was positive by about

18 basis points on the day. So a little mixed, mostly down, and it was a good day for technology names and a bad day for some value and more defensive type names, particularly some of the financials, which kicked off earnings season.

And that was the other big piece of news. So we're starting to get into now Q2 earning season. We've got all the big banks, or not all of them, but some of the big names that you'll know, some that we own as well reported today.

Largely better than expected as far as top line numbers and bottom line.

But inside of those numbers, there was some sort of mediocre results.

And the market had just been pricing and a lot of perfection.

The sector itself, if you looked at

like the XLF, which is the select sector spider for the financial sector, it's up about 14%

just this quarter. Most of those names are up about 20%. So a lot of good stuff was already

priced in. And so some of the names were up nicely and then some of them are quite down. And the mix of that, depending on which one was located within the Dow, drove that indices down a little bit more.

But largely the results were about in line where you got net interest income fairly positive.

You got trading that was fairly positive.

Again, if you think about the volatility that we had in early April, of course, that's good for a lot of these big banks.

And then you had a pickup in some of the M&A and IPO activity.

That's also good for especially some of the investment banking activity in there.

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