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 Wednesday, May the 7th. Brian Saitel with you here today on an update in markets. We broke a two-day down streak

here after a nine-day winning streak, although it was a very choppy session. Markets were all over

the place, frankly, and mostly traded around fair value. But the Dow ended up rallying towards

the close. Few reasons for that, as I'll mention. But we closed up 284 points on the Dow S&P was up about

four-tenths of a percent NASDAQ was up about one quarter of 1 percent so positive

across the board but let me give you an idea of what I mean by a choppy session so on

the session the dollar was up 0.2 percent gold was down 0.9 percent Bitcoin was up 1.8% and oil was down 1.7%. So it's an up, down, up, down deal.

And that's exactly what the market did. And a lot of that was around the conclusion of the

two-day Fed meeting, where, as was expected, they left rates on change. So we're still at 4.5

to 4.5%. They did a pretty good job of

walking back any direction on what they're going to do regarding tariffs because they simply don't know.

So while it's not hyper reassuring, it is honest at least, and I'll take it. But they said the risks on

both sides of their mandate have risen. So the risk to inflation is now higher because of tariffs and the risk

to employment is now higher because of tariffs. But they're trying to figure out or at least get

some semblance of a direction before they want to just make a move. And that makes sense to me.

I don't think that they need to just look a finger or stick it in the air and see which way

the one's blowing and try to just pick a direction on rates without knowing anything. Technically, employment is holding in there. Inflation has been lower, and that's what they're hired to do. So until some of those things change, so be it. And if that puts them behind the curve, since we don't know where the curve is going to be exactly, I don't know if you can get in front of it here. They obviously spoke about if current tariff rates were to stay in there

that it would be very bad for both employment and inflation, but they'll have to let things evolve

there a little bit. There was some weakness of technology on the day. The largest search engine company

was down significantly because of the largest smartphone company stating that they will use

artificial intelligent technology

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