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 is Brian Sightel from our Newport Beach, California office here, TBGHQ, On basically a broad upday in markets, modestly

so, you had all three stock indices up. You actually had a larger move higher in some of the

tech sectors, like the NASDAQ, for example, which was up about three quarters of a percent. The

S&P was up half of a percent. Dow was up about a quarter of a percent. The S&P was up half of a percent.

Dow was up about a quarter of a percent across the board there.

And you had interest rates that were slightly higher on the yield curve,

so 10-year moved up three basis points on the day.

So quite a bit of economic news out on the day,

and that's what I'll go through and spend most of the time on today.

There was one, two, three, four pieces out to, that were of note. One of them was the FOMC minutes from January. This is the last Fed meeting where they held rates steady. There was more of a hawkish tone in the minutes, citing that inflation was slower to move back to their 2% target. We did get jobs numbers after

that report, so keep that in mind. Some of these things can change month to month, but somewhat more

hawkish tone there. You had industrial production for the month of January. This is a non-delayed

report, actually, a fresh, relevant one that was better than expected. We got a 0.7 versus a 0.4 on the month,

which was good. And then you had durable goods orders that were down for the month of December. This is

actually slightly delayed, but they were down 1.4% for the month of December. It was actually better than

consensus. We thought they'd be down about two. But if you strip out a little more volatile sectors and cyclical stuff like transportation, for example, they were actually up 0.9% on the month, better than expected. So all that to say, what does it mean? Durable goods orders are big things, expensive things that are important because they're a leading

indicator because you buy those big expensive things like machinery and aircraft and vehicles and

equipment to produce stuff for a long period of time. And they're bigger investment. So if you're

doing that, gives a high level of business confidence, gives you a high level of activity and output and

economic growth that you can look into. So we look at those things pretty carefully. If you

start to peel back that onion a little bit on durable goods, if you looked at like core capital

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