Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Good evening and welcome to Dividend Cafe. This is Wednesday, January 7th. Brian Saitel back with you here today, again, from our West Palm Beach, Florida office.

And what one day giveeth, the next day taketh.

We had up days for two days in a row, and today was more or less a down day across the board.

The only thing that was positive was two things.

One was the bond market, was slightly positive.

You had treasury yields drop a few basis points

on the yield curve, and so bonds rallied slightly. And then you had volatility pick up about 4%.

The VIX was up, four and a half percent roughly to still the low 15s, though. And for volatility,

if you want to know what that means, that's on the lower end. So historically, markets are actually

behaving quite nicely even with today's sell-off. But the stock market was down a little under 1%

on the Dow. And in today's terms, that equals 466 points. S&P was negative by a third of a percent.

And then NASDAQ was actually slightly positive, just barely.

So you had a little bit of a reversion the other way from value to growth today.

Some of the tech names actually performed better than some of the more value-oriented names

in the market.

That's what you have there.

There was a good amount of data and news and just stuff going on in headlines in markets,

and I'll walk through that a little bit. On the geopolitical side, positive headlines about a

Ukraine settlement, potentially off-putting or concerning headlines about oil coming out of Venezuela

and coming to the U.S. to replenish some reserves in the tune of several billion. Remember, there's

sanctions against shipping Venezuela oil elsewhere, and those will probably be lifted. And there was

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