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. This is Brian Saitel with you here as your host on an upday overall in markets across the board. It was a little bit of a

rotation day. We had the Dow up more than the other indices. Dow was actually up 182 points on the

day. SMP was completely flat and the NASDAQ was completely flat, give or take.

Interest rates came down a little bit. There's some continued back and forth on whether

there's some sort of framework of a deal between the U.S. and Iran, and that's the story that is ongoing. But we're at 4.48 on the 10-year today. We had Brent that was down almost 5% on the day. So oil's coming off a little bit. And with that, some of these inflation expectations, and then with that, some of the interest straight expectations as well. There really wasn't a lot of new data out on the day, so it was somewhat directionless on the economic side. There really wasn't anything meaningful for me to go through with you today. There'll be a lot tomorrow. I think there's five different data points I'm going to walk through, including PCE tomorrow. But today, there really wasn't much, and it was quiet. So what I wrote about a little bit was just the comparison about the late 90s versus now,

because there's been a lot of things written about it. But there is a lot of differences.

There's a lot of similarities, too. If you remember back then, the amount of capex that was going

into fiber optic cabling and networking to build the internet was massive you also had the entirety of

america corporate america rebranding all of their businesses to a dot com if you remember and now it's

a i anything adjacent to ai has increased the multiple on the company that you're running and so they're

all talking about it and then just the concentration of the index in one sector which was tech it's

different now you can look at the AI names but also it's a lot of the semis too if you look at these

trillion dollar valuations a lot more of them today than there ever has been in history of course

and some of these smaller semi companies are now breaching a trillion so interesting times indeed

but if you look at the multiples

between the two eras, you had forward earnings that were trading higher back in the 90s than they

are today. That's true. But the delta is lower than you think. We were trading at about 24 times

forward through much of the 95 to 95 era. And today we're a call it 22 times forward. So there's a

delta there. There's a difference.

That's a higher quality factor. But the other thing is when you look at the earnings per share

growth of markets and the total return over those five years, in the 90s, you had the total return

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