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 Wednesday, April the 30th. Brian Saitel is with you here today on quite an interesting, as I'll'll call it trading day today. The Dow this morning

was actually down 700 points and ended up regaining some of that through mid-morning and then

built on gains and then actually got in a positive territory, believe it or not, before the

closed. So we closed up 141 points on the Dow. The S&P was up just slightly about eight points, but that

puts the S&P higher now seven days in a row. And for any of those trying to predict how this last

week would have gone in markets, I think most would have predicted incorrectly, because it's

just been counterintuitive, given everything that has transpired here today.

The big news on the day was about GDP, and there was fear in markets that it was going to really fall off a cliff.

Some of the early trackers, for example, the Atlanta Fed GDP, which is a heavily watched gauge of trying to predict wherever GDP is going to come in,

had a negative 2.7% GDP number

for the quarter. A lot of that was around imports and particularly gold, and so they

changed their model to try to make it more accurate. But even firms like J.P. Morgan and Goldman

had pretty dire predictions for the quarter. So everyone knew it was going to be bad. And the reason is that a trade is part of that calculation. And so if you get a big surge of orders that are trying to be in advance of tariffs, that's going to cause a lot of fluctuation. And so getting a negative number of point three today versus potentially a positive point three, at

least that's what consensus was, is actually not all that bad. And I think markets found some footing

based on that. But you also had ADP private payrolls that were weaker than expected. We were

thinking 120. We got 62, so call it half on private payroll numbers, so a little softening on the employment

front. But then you also had, for another mixed bag, you had inflation, which is the PCE number,

come in unchanged at 0.0%. It was only expected to be slightly positive, but still, you put the

year over year on headline at 2.3, which is fastly moving

towards their 2% target on inflation. So there you have it. Mix bag on the economic front,

pretty much across the board. There was a consumer spending number, even to give you another

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