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 is Tuesday, March the 11th. Brian Sightel is with you here from our West Palm Beach, Florida office.

On another hectic and volatile

trading day, I'll say, we had the markets actually open up on the S&P 500 at least, positive on this

morning after yesterday's big drawdown. So we had some recovery early on that led way to losses.

And most of that was around more volatile tariff headlines on taxation and trade between different

borders, particularly the U.S. and Canada today. We then rallied before the close with some

undoing of some of that tariff talk and then we ended up closing back down not quite at the lows,

but at least halfway there on the day. So what a day. Quite a lot of volatility.

Technically, the last six trading days in 2025 have seen the worst three days of the year.

So like I said, you know, volatility is really picking up here around much to do with trade.

So the Dow closed down 478 points today.

S&P down about 0.76%, and then the NASDAQ only down about 0.18%.

So it was a reversal of some of the rotation from growth to value today. You actually had value,

sell off a good amount, and growth outperform. So essentially we had Trump mentioned new tariffs

on aluminum and steel to Canada this morning, 25% in addition to the 25%

already set to take effect tomorrow. That would bring it to 50%. Canada said they were going to

impose a 25% tariff on electricity production that goes basically to the northeast. And that's a big

deal. This comes from Ontario down into the northeast. And then towards about an hour left in trading, Canada said they would undo that in posit, and Trump said the same thing with his 25% edition. So round and round we go here. This is a back and forth. And as we've written about a couple different times and spoken about, there's something to be said about what will actually happen and what will get talked about and what will be negotiated.

And these things are tough to frankly even record and talk about and write about because intraday, intra hour, one thing leads to the next.

And if the news feed is off by an hour, you might read it the wrong way.

Nonetheless, that's the market we're in. And I want to make sure that you're aware of it. We look at this as a lot of volatility and noise around that uncertainty. On the economic side of things, it remains to be intact, at least for the time being, but of course, these things can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, and we're paying very close attention to it. So I wouldn't dismiss any of it. This is all meaningful and we're paying

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