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. It is Wednesday, February the 19th. This is Brian Saitel from our West Palm Beach office here on what is another basically quiet day in markets overall. The Dow ended up closing up 71 points. S&P was up a quarter of a percent, NASDAQ was flat. So very similar to yesterday. There was some talk of tariffs on different industries today, but my new rule is until something feels like or is getting much closer to actually happening, I don't know that there's a lot of need to discuss what may have been spoken about or what may or may not actually happen.

So I'll shelve that one for today.

There has been some more talk, at least in the headlines of some opening of

talks between the U.S. and Russia on the Ukraine conflict. And just to talk about this a little bit,

again, there's nothing in the news or definitive happening yet. And frankly, I'd be shocked

if there was some deal that was brokered where all the sudden you had sanctions

immediately lifted against Russia on this thing. You still have to go and deal with and speak to the

EU. There's just a whole lot of other things going on. We do know, however, that an agenda item

for the current administration is to reduce the price of energy. And we also know that there is a

desire to end some of these conflicts and things. We'll have to see how this thing shakes out.

For now, my comment in here is what actually happens to the energy market, if something does

come to fruition. A couple of things, look, it would create volatility.

So I'm not trying to diffuse that component of it. I think prices of oil would be volatile.

I think prices in the overall markets would be quite volatile around stuff like that. That's not

what I'm saying. But what I am saying is the fact that Russian supply was taken off the market

is true. Off of the open market is the key word.

It still exists. It's being sold to Asia, essentially. China and India primarily are buying a lot of it.

They're paying a discounted price because of the deal that they're getting and Russia can't sell it to the developed world, essentially, but it still

exists. And whether China or India was buying it from Russia, whether they were buying it from

elsewhere, the demand still exists and the consumption still exists. My comment is just

changing the sanction paradigm will cause volatility, but it may actually not change the price

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