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 back to Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel, your host here this midweek edition on Wednesday, July 15th.

Positive day overall in markets modestly, we had the Dow close up 150 points.

S&P was up almost 4 tenths of a percent. NASDAQ was up 6 tenths of a percent.

So positive in stocks. We had some continued positive earnings of the undertone. We're now about

5, 6% into reporting season in Q2 on the SMP 500, tilted towards positive bias. And so the underlying

tone in the markets is to the upside. You still have this ongoing back and forth in the Middle

East, and that is continuing to put

some a lid a little bit on some animal spirits in markets, but nonetheless, the backdrop

remains fairly positive. As we've written about, a lot of the momentum names have come off,

including the semiconductors. They continue to be under a lot of pressure, software names,

also the same of the last month or so. But what I wanted to talk a

little bit about just because we are into earnings season here is the strength we've seen in the

financials. I always love seeing this because when you've got strong financials, it's really

hard to have a real weak or deteriorating economy underlying those financials. Lending and bank activity and M&A all being up big numbers.

Investment banking so far in these big banks that have reported has been up 30%.

Capital market activity just in general is up over 15%.

So earnings on those financials are up over 6%.

And those are all positive things. And if you remember

during the zero interest rate period, ZERP in 21, you had this huge explosion in M&A transactions

because they all of a sudden all penciled. They're leveraged buyouts, a lot of them. So you can borrow

at 1%. All of a sudden, the numbers make sense. You had this huge boom.

...