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, March the 3rd.

I'm Brian Saitel, your host for the day on a volatile day overall in the stock market.

We actually opened up down about 850 points on the Dow.

We got down to about 1,200 below fair value midday, but then markets started to react a little better and markets recovered.

We ended up down only 400 points on the Dow in about 1% on the

S&P and about 1% on the NASDAQ. So all three indices much more moving in unison today than what

has been the case recently. The bond market was only up in basis point terms on the 10-year

one basis point. We were actually up over six

basis points and there was follow-through because of what has turned into a closure essentially of

the Strait of Hormuz. And I'll talk about that a little bit more, but that essentially sends

oil prices higher and we saw them close only up 2.8%. But we actually at one point on the day, we're up over

9% because there's such a large amount of oil that goes through there, about 21 million

barrels a day go through there. Forty-five percent of that, for what it's worth, is actually

for China as well. So the issue with some of those tensions are if that gets shut or you get loss of

these tanker boats and these losses of energy supply, China has already said that it wants both

sides to make sure that doesn't happen. If that ends up happening, the worst thing would be

China's involvement to try to get things reopened. And we haven't heard that or anything,

but that's the fears that go through markets early in the morning and overnight gets priced in,

and then things calm down a little bit throughout the trading day. What did happen is the U.S.

assured towards that same period of time that they would either beef up insurances for those tankers,

which have to get that war insurance to go through the

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