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

This is Wednesday, July the 2nd. Brian Saitel is with you here. On a fairly flat day, albeit slightly to the positive inequities, a little bit of the opposite of yesterday. Yesterday, the Dow was up significantly, both the S&P and NASDAQ sold off. Dow is completely flat, but you had a little bit of an up move about to five-tenths of a percent on the S&P higher and about nine-tenths higher on the NASDAQ or so. Both of those were record close highs on those two indexes.

The bond market, slight sell-off in prices. You had the yield on the 10-year up about three basis points.

So not a lot of movement, and the big piece of economic data that was out today was on the ADP private payroll number.

We got a negative 33,000 print. This is the first negative number that we've seen

in over two years. It was March of 2023. It's not a huge negative number, but negative nonetheless,

and we'll get the non-farm payroll report out tomorrow. Markets tend to pay much more attention

to the non-farm payroll report and the unemployment rate more than they do on ADP.

And frankly, the last call it three, four months, we've seen ADP disappoint,

and then we've seen non-farm payroll come in and either be right in line

or meaningfully above expectations.

And so that's what's really driven market.

So again, with the holiday on Friday, we're going to get that number early on Thursday tomorrow. So we'll keep you posted on that front. But all in all, if you look at the employment picture, this isn't a labor market that is falling out of bed. There's just some cracks in the dam here because what's happening is you've got weekly claims that have inched up. We were in the low 200s for a year and a half. We're now in this

call it 235 to 240 range on weekly claims. So there's more people filing for unemployment.

The continuing claims number is also edged up here a little bit higher. Then you see ADP private

numbers come out meaningfully lower the last couple of months, below expectations.

That's another sign there. And then if you look at just the total amount of unemployed versus job

openings, remember yesterday we had that big beat in jolts. This is the new job openings number.

That tends to be a forward-looking and positive indicator when you have more job openings

coming out in the employment side. So I'm chalking that up to a fairly balanced labor

market between employed and job openings. And so I'm not ready to write this as employment

meaningfully weakening from here. And I don't think the Fed is either. And so when they're saying

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