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 Brian Saitel, your host this evening here from our West Palm Beach, Florida office.

Here in a bright sunny day, both outside

of my office and in the markets. We had a rally across the board, when I say across the board,

pretty much across the board. Stocks, bonds, oil, the precious metals, dollar, pretty much

everything was up on the day. Dow ended up closing 340 points higher, S&P was up a percent.

NASDAQ was up about a 1.6 percent. So this was the opposite of the rotation that I wrote about yesterday,

where you had a big outsized performance in sort of the momentum names from last year. I think of all

the AI names, the semiconductors, the chips, that mostly technology companies,

a lot of the crypto stuff was up today. So all the shiny objects from yesteryear were up a lot today

and let the good times roll there. So that's what you had in markets and the reason was because of

the ceasefire announcement or the extension of it, moreover last night from the Trump administration.

So there actually

wasn't a timeline put on it. And also because the oil market was up on the day, so he had a

big rally in stocks, but oil was also up. So it tells me a couple things. One, I don't think the

oil markets are pricing in a near-term resolution and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz anytime

soon.

And then second, the market really is looking to move on from just being engrossed in geopolitics alone and start to focus on the actual fundamentals.

Because they're actually quite good, and the things that I'll point out I've mentioned before,

but we're now at a new number of EPS growth estimated for year over year, which is about 18%.

So that's super robust.

Historically, the long-term average is closer to seven.

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