Tuesday - June 30, 2026
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brian Szytel recaps markets on June 30, the last day of Q2, noting a strong first half for the Dow and the best Nasdaq quarter since 2020, with tech leading as the Dow rose 136 points, the S&P 500 gained 0.8%, and the Nasdaq rose 1.5% while the 10-year yield increased 8 bps. He highlights the Japanese yen at its weakest versus the dollar in over 40 years (~162), describing the yen carry trade and warning that BOJ interventions (about 11 trillion yen) and rate hikes could trigger volatility like August 2024. He also discusses rising system leverage, with margin debt up 54% year over year to about $1.4T and the risks of triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs for retail investors. Economic data included weaker consumer confidence, stronger JOLTS openings with steady quits, lower Chicago PMI, and softer Case-Shiller home prices (down monthly, +0.7% YoY).
00:00 Market Wrap Q2 Finale
01:32 Yen Weakness And Carry Trade
02:40 BOJ Intervention Risks
03:47 Leverage Rising In Markets
04:22 Margin Debt And Leveraged ETFs
05:51 Economic Data Roundup
06:48 Closing Thoughts And Sign Off
Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:10.0 | Welcome back to Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel, your host this evening, here on Tuesday afternoon, June the 30th. So literally the last day of Q2 is upon us. |
| 0:24.2 | And the second half of the year begins tomorrow. |
| 0:26.7 | Crazy how time flies so fast as these years keep ticking by. |
| 0:30.9 | But that's where we are. |
| 0:31.7 | And on the day the market was up, and it was actually |
| 0:36.3 | one of the better starts to the first half of the year in the last five years, at least for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. So that's good for the quarter. This was the best quarter for the NASDAQ since 2020. Robust markets all around, a lot of it, CAPEX driven in AI. And we had the Iran war start in early spring and then dissipate here. |
| 0:56.6 | And markets have felt a little bit better about that. |
| 0:58.9 | Interest rates that were set to decline when we started the year are now set to remain the same, |
| 1:03.0 | slightly rise. |
| 1:04.5 | So the market has digested all those things quite well. |
| 1:07.3 | But on the day, the Dow was up a little over 100 points, 136 points, S&P was up 8 tenths of a |
| 1:13.3 | percent, NASDAQ was up 1.5 percent. So this is a rotation the other way. Tech led the way |
| 1:19.5 | today in the market. You also had interest rates move up a little bit. The tenure was actually up |
| 1:23.9 | eight basis points. Oil was down a little on WTI and up a little bit on Brent, but |
| 1:29.6 | marginally and we're at about $70 to $73 between those two things and the energy markets. |
| 1:35.6 | But the one thing that was on my mind today was about the Japanese yen. This is a currency |
| 1:41.1 | that has weakened substantially. The yen is now the weakest against the |
| 1:44.9 | dollar since I was in second grade. So that's over 40 years ago to date myself. And while I was more |
| 1:52.9 | trading baseball cards back then than I was trading stocks and paying attention to what the yen was |
| 1:57.1 | versus the dollar, there was something called the Plaza Corp. And this was a multi-country consortium with an effort to try to weaken the dollar, there was something called the Plaza Corps, and this was a multi-country |
| 2:01.4 | consortium with an effort to try to weaken the dollar and strengthen the yen and back then |
... |
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