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

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello, happy new year.

Welcome to the Dividendin Cafe, our first Friday Dividendon Cafe at 26, where we are going to jump right into our annual year

behind, year ahead special. We're going to do an extensive review of everything that was

2025. We're going to do a report card on ourselves, the themes we set for 2025, and how those

actually played out. And then we're going to set some themes,

forecast perspectives for 2026, give you our preview of the year ahead. This has become an annual

tradition at the Bonson Group. I actually debate how many years we've done it because it started

back at Morgan Stanley

and I just don't have the records and can't remember exactly the very first year.

But it's somewhere between 13 and 15 years now that we've been doing this.

And the goal is to give you a really comprehensive assessment of what just was,

but give you something actionable,

something contemplative, something useful as we think about the year ahead. I'm going to cut the introduction there because I know I can ramble on and on and we have so much to go through,

but this is going to be a very fun dividend cafe. I am actually, literally, I'm not going to read

from the white paper itself, but I'm sitting here holding the actual paper, and I'm going to try

my best to go through so that those of you that are listening on the podcast are watching the

video are going to get the same information that everybody gets by reading the PDF of the white paper.

Now, of course, the charts and things will be up on the screen as much as possible as I go through

for those of you watching the video.

But let's get right into it and see if you can't get the same experience listening as I intended

...