The Dividend Cafe - Wednesday - July 22, 2026

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

On Wednesday, July 22, Brian Szytel reports a quiet, mostly flat market day: the Dow and S&P 500 were flat, the Nasdaq fell about 0.4%, the 10-year Treasury yield rose roughly three basis points to 4.66%, and WTI oil gained about 2.5% amid continued Middle East turmoil. With no economic news, he discusses a Goldman Sachs white paper on global demographics, noting slowing or negative population growth in the developed world (Japan and China already peaked; Europe close), and that U.S. demographics are relatively better due to immigration, supporting a premium equity multiple alongside higher productivity. He also notes U.S. multinationals’ foreign revenue share has declined since the 2010s. Finally, he explains the S&P can be positive while momentum/semiconductor names enter a bear market because money rotated into other sectors, shown by equal-weight S&P strength versus cap-weight weakness. 00:00 Market Wrap Snooze Fest 00:48 Why So Quiet Today 01:14 Goldman Demographics Paper 02:00 GDP Growth Headwinds 03:14 Emerging Markets Reality Check 03:52 US Valuation Premium Case 04:21 Global Revenue And Dollar Talk 04:52 Tech Bear Market Question 05:16 Rotation Explains The S&P 05:53 Closing Thoughts And Thanks Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Hello and welcome back into Dividend Cafe. This is Brian Saitel, your host here this evening on Wednesday, July the 22nd, in really a pretty flat day in markets overall. This was what I'd call a snooze fest in capital markets. You've got to the Dow that was flat, S&P, also flat, NASDAW. stack was actually down about four-tenths of a percent. So a little bit more sell-off in some of the technology names in there. But overall, stocks were really sanguine, really quiet. So you had the 10-year treasury up about three basis points. We closed at 466 on tens. And then with some continued Middle East turmoil, oil was up again today, about two and a half percent on WTI. Brent was also flat. So really a pretty quiet day. And the reason is that there just wasn't a lot of news out. The

economic calendar was totally quiet. There really wasn't much going on there. We do get some more data coming out tomorrow that we'll be able to talk through, but without more headlines and media around different things in Middle East or this or that, there just wasn't a lot going on to market. So what I did is wanted to talk a little bit about more some long, evergreen sort of topics today in light of those things. So what I wanted to mention is about a white paper that I read on a flight, actually back from Palm Beach to Newport Beach from Goldman Sachs. This is a long white paper. It was about 50 pages long. It was talking about the different demographic changes and population around the world. And it's really pretty fascinating. Some of the distinctions that the writer was making was just

about the backdrop. We talk about at the Bonson Group a lot of bottom-up fundamental analysis of businesses, and that's what we do. That's our bread and butter for our dividend portfolio. This is more of a macro-related theme. And while it doesn't know, necessarily drive an investment decision for us, so we wouldn't place money based on some of these very long-term trends. It is interesting to note backdrop changes. And so what we're talking about here is in the developed world, the population growth is actually slowing and stopping and also going to go negative here shortly. In places like the country of Japan and also China, both of those population growths and populations have actually peaked.

And so they're going to start declining here in the 2030s. And Europe is basically right there with them. And then in the United States, we also would have an organic birth-to-death rate peak in the 2030s. But since we allow and promote, frankly, immigration in this country more than others, the population itself doesn't peak until about 2060. Then there'll be some decline to it. So when you think about the calculation of what GDP is, it is, it is, the population growth plus productivity growth.

So if you have one of those two parts of the equation that's going to go zero or even slightly negative, then the only way GDP is going to keep up is with an expansion of productivity growth. Of course, that's what we're seeing with AI, and that's a nice thing. But nonetheless, it paints a backdrop that's going to have a little bit less of a tailwind and a little bit more of a headwind in the developed world. And I went through this white paper thinking the takeaway was going to be that the growth is all in the emerging world, and that's not true either, because other than India having population growth for the next coming couple decades, it also will peak and then start to slow and then decline.

If you look at South American countries, other parts of the emerging world, it's not like they have population growth more than the developed world, and the difference is the developed world, frankly, quote-unquote, got rich before the population started declining. A lot of those emerging market countries, the population is going to start declining really before they hit their stride on quote unquote, becoming rich. So all those things play into an investment paradigm. When you think about the equity multiples around the world, the U.S. is more expensive. We're trading it 22 times earnings. But when you think about population demographics in this country being better than most other places, arguably all of the developed world that's better, there's that going for it. And then you

also have higher productivity here than those other places too. So the two parts of that GDP equation are both better in the United States. That would make sense to have a pretty or a higher equity multiple on it. Keep that in mind. The other thing I'll say is because corporations have tethered a lot of their revenues globally nowadays, a lot of this means that we're all in it together. But if you look at U.S. multinationals, the percentage of foreign revenue has actually been declining since the 2010s, believe it or not.

A lot of the talk has been, we should buy international stocks and the dollar is going to devalue and these different things. But the reality is that's not necessarily true when you look at it from the lens of demographics like that. So I thought that is interesting and worth talking through in a slower day other than that. The question that came in today was about the momentum names being in a bare market. This is get splashed all over the media. It's really talking about the semis. Semis were up 100% over the past year and then they sold off 20% and of course that catches headlines. That's fine. But the question is about why the S&P is so heavily weighted in technology and the momentum names having a

bare market, how is the S&P still positive on the air? The reason is that those two things can be true at the same time. You can have a positive S&P 500 and a bare market and momentum names, even though they're mostly technology, because that was a rotation more than anything. So you had a sell inside of some of those technology names, but that money went other places inside of the equity market, in other words. So it just rotated. You can see that because the equal weight S&P is up about three and a half percent on the month and the cap weighted is slightly negative. And that's what's going on there. So that's the answer to that question. It's a change in dynamic of equity market, not necessarily a broad sell-off in the equity itself. That's where I'm

going to leave it for the day, because I don't have anything else on the economic side to go through with you. But I appreciate you listening, as always, as I walk through some of these longer-term trends and encourage your questions and have a good evening. Thank you. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with Hightower Securities LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, and with Hightower Advisors, 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.

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