Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to not only the Dividendon Cafe, but to 2024.

We're already into the new year at this point, but as promised, we want to kick off the Dividing Cafe this year with our annual year ahead, year behind discussion where we really want to dive into what took place in 2023, evaluate even some of our own forecast from a year ago and discuss what we're envisioning

for 2024. It's one of my favorite things to do every year. It is not only a wonderful

deliverable to put in your guys' hands, whether you're listening to this podcast, watching this

video,

or reading the white paper we put together. The white paper has something in the range of 20 different

charts. It's over 20 pages. There's a lot of writing that's gone into this. And, you know,

I pour myself into this project every year. But honestly, the most fun part of it is not just the deliverable

that goes. It's the process. Being able to spend the time in reflection of what took place,

what was wrong in our thinking, where we want to modify thinking going forward, the perspectives

that are necessary thematically to properly steward client capital

in the year ahead. It's a very significant task. It's one I take very seriously and honestly

want to have a lot of fun with. And now is the time where we want to kind of bring you some of those

final takeaways from the process.

At this point, I think everyone's aware that 2023 ended up being a phenomenal year for risk

assets. There were moments in the year where it didn't always feel like that. The day-to-day

volatility in markets is definitely

higher, particularly in the bond market than it has been over the last several years it's

higher than it had been in a lot of the years, let's say, from about 2010 to about 2020. There was a

real diminished intraday volatility with markets for a while.

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