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

Welcome back to Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel, your host here on Wednesday, June 24th, on what started off, at least, to be a nice recovery bounce,

and particularly in technology, which really got walloped yesterday. And most of the day,

we traded positive. Interest rates came down, 10 was down, 10 year was down maybe eight bases

points. And so you had also WTI came down a little bit. So there was some room for stocks to

improve. But you just sell stocks fizzle out.

And then really what happened yesterday resumed through the afternoon to a lesser degree,

but you had an unwinding more of some of the tech names and some of the value-oriented names

fared much better in the session. But that was basically the day. It was a fizzled rally that began and

then ended. The underlying theme here continues to be valuation based. We've talked about that a lot

with some of the things that have just gone up so high and so much and gotten so expensive.

But the other part of things also has to do with just the market is digesting something that is tough to digest. The trade of Hormas is somewhat more open than it was, but not fully back to normal. There isn't a final deal done with the U.S. and Iran. So the price of oil, which breached technically, it got under $70 on WTI briefly. Those things aren't going to last if the straight is going to be permanently impaired,

and we just don't know the answer to that. And so you have different things trying to price that in.

The stock market is really more focused on the AI and the capital expenditure and the story of

growth in the market, earnings per share growth, and the higher margins. And those things are all true.

That issue there is those things are also hard to keep repeating at the higher margins. And those things are all true. That issue there is those things are also

hard to keep repeating at the same level. And so what the bond market, I believe, is telling us now,

if you look at the yield curve flattening here a bit, we were at 80 basis points beginning of the

year on twos and tens, the spread of the difference and the yield curve and we're now at about 28 basis

points actually 26 now as it today. So what's happening there is the yield curve is now flattening

out that signaling growth is going to slow down because inflation is not perceived to be put to

bed yet. You have a new Fed chair obviously that has pressure to lower rates. But what is priced in and what he

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