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

Hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe. I am your host, David Bonson.

I'm the Chief Investment Officer here at the Bonson Group, and our entire team

is in Dallas, Texas right now, where we are doing our company offsite, our annual retreat,

if you will, a couple days of meeting, sessions, discussions, and hopefully a little bit of fun and all that kind of stuff

as well. And then we all go back to our respective destinations on Saturday and Sunday. So the reason

I bring that up is that we really care about this event a lot because we really care about the client experience

that we deliver. To say we care about it is somewhat cliche and also understates the reality.

We obsess over it. We're a very competitive and driven group. And there's also about 90 of us now. And the first time we ever did this kind of off-site that has been an annual tradition for many, many years now, there were six of us there. And so it's grown a lot over the years and the complexity that goes into the event and how we go about really try to build that culture,

that camaraderie with one another, and yet drive a better, shall we say, business plan out of it,

the way in which we go about serving clients, which is our business.

It's really a wonderful experience and event.

I just wanted to share that with all of the Dividing Cafe listeners and viewers. Now, business must go on, of course, and right now, one of the

major elements of business and markets has been the U.S.-China deal. Now, it's not just right now.

It's not just because last weekend,

the president announced that they had basically gotten to the point they wanted to get with President Xi of China. In rating the deal on a scale of 10, President Trump said it was a 12.

But that's all current events and important right now

and where I'm going to focus today's Dividend Cafe talk on. But the China-U.S. story has been a

major story, if not the major story, and adjacent to the major story of the economy all year.

And of course, we remember the drama in markets back at Liberation Day in early April,

which is now seven months ago.

But even entering 2025 after the Trump election in November, we knew that U.S. China trade and the overall issue of

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