The Dividend Cafe - The DC Today - Thursday, May 18, 2023

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/42OsEsd Welcome to DC Today, I am Trevor Cummings filling in for David Bahnsen. Today we have an update on unemployment claims, existing home sales, daily market moves, and even Donald Trump shows up in today’s Ask David. Links mentioned in this episode: TheDCToday.com DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the DC Today, your daily market synopsis of the Dividend Cafe, brought to you every Monday through Thursday to bring you up-to-date information and perspective on financial markets. Hello, welcome to DC Today. I'm Trevor Cummings, filling in for David Bonson. He is in the greatest city in the world. He's in New York City running around today, so I said I'd fill in for him. He'll be back tomorrow, though, with his special long form dividend cafe. I'd encourage

you to not miss it. And what is everyone talking about right now? The debt ceiling. If you're talking to somebody in finance, they are shaking their head and pulling their hair out like, why are we talking about this? It will get resolved. Yet it's the headlines everywhere. So Kevin McCarthy said some positive sentiment towards it getting resolved. Yet, it's the headlines everywhere. So Kevin McCarthy said some positive sentiment towards it getting resolved. So markets took off. Markets were up two days in a row. You saw the NASDAQ did a lot better than the Dow and S&P. Why? Because it was led by the technology sector. The specifics were the Dow was up 115 points. That's 0.34%. The S&P was up 0.94%. 15 points. That's 0.34%. The S&P was up 0.94%. NASDAQ up 1.51%. Like I said, the technology sector led the way, which was up 2.06% on the day. Real estate, the worst performing sector,

was down 0.68%. And oil was at $72.06 a barrel, which was down 1.15%. So it gives you the daily happenings in the market, some of the news, which was all basically muted by anybody's interest in what's going on the debt ceiling. But you did have existing or new home sale or sorry, existing home sales published today, it was above estimation. And you had the unemployment numbers, which I'll pause there. The unemployment numbers were kind of interesting. We started January unemployment claims around 200,000. You saw a little bit of spike, but then you had news come out saying that Massachusetts, which seemed off the charts with where their claims were, had a lot of fraudulent claims. And if you know anything about data, it's garbage in, garbage out. So what they looked at is to see, hey, can they resolve

some of those fraudulent claims? You saw just the unemployment claims in Massachusetts go from somewhere in the range of 35,000 down to 20,000. So almost cut in half. Still more claims than New York and Texas. And you can do the math. There's a lot more people in New York and Texas than Massachusetts. So those claims came in at 242,000. Last week, that was 264,000. Yes, above that 200,000 abnormally low threshold we set in January, but still not a lot of labor concerns out there. In other data points, you had the Philadelphia Fed factory survey came out, reported a negative reporting, which that's nine months in a row, but matches what you saw earlier this week in the Empire State Survey. Again, all

of this is leading indicators to what people think the ISM prints will be. I'm going to encourage you to go to the Ask David because you can't get far from Donald Trump. He made his way to the Ask David section today. The reader was asking basically if Donald Trump won the primary or if he ran or he didn't run, kind of what impact does that have from David's perspective on investing and how he manages the portfolio. Here's the interesting thing. I love that David pointed this out. He uses the word multivariant, meaning when you're looking at making investing decisions, it is never, and if you didn't hear that, I want to repeat it, it is never one variable. If you're a Republican and think that markets do bad when

there's a Democrat in charge, or if you're a Democrat and think that markets do bad when there's a Democrat in charge or if you're a Democrat and think that markets do bad when Republican in charge guess what you are dead wrong you have to study here history and look at the empirical evidence it is a multi-variant situation you have to look at a lot of questions and David listed a handful of those questions so good reminder to investors to be careful about how we let our political opinions and our fears and our anxieties, our hopes, and all that get in the way of sound investing principles. So if you want to build those sound investing principles, I'm going to invite you back tomorrow to read David's Dividend Cafe. Again, that's the long form. And then I will

be delivering on Saturday. Every week, I try to do my best to give you a writing in thoughtsonmoney.com. Very easy to remember, thoughtsonmoney.com. So that'll be me signing off for today. And again, you'll have David Bonson back with you tomorrow. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with Hightower Securities LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, and with Hightower Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Securities are offered through Hightower Securities LLC. Advisory services are offered through Hightower Advisors LLC. This is not an offer to buy or sell securities. No investment process is free of risk. There is no guarantee that the investment process or investment opportunities referenced herein will be profitable. Past performance is not indicative of current or future performance and is not a guarantee.

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