Tuesday - September 8, 2026

0:00Welcome to the dividend cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Welcome back to dividend cafe. As always here on Tuesday, Brian Cytel with you here as your host on another down day. Obviously yesterday markets were closed for Labor Day, the holiday and but Friday they were down a similar amount. The Dow actually closed lower on the day by just over 600.628. S&P was down half of a percent. Nasdaq was down a third of a percent. So 628 down on the Dow is obviously a red number but in today's terms, that's about a little over a percent. So keep that in mind. On the year the Dow is still up a little over 10 and a half percent or so. But it was going all over the place day. WTI was higher. We had some pickup and kinetic activity between the US and Iran and Middle East back and forth. And that is ongoing.

1:00It's a WTI up about 2.5 percent on the day. That puts WTI at 93.6 and then Brent at 98. So those levels keep creeping back up. Oil stocks have performed because of it. Inflation expectations have moved higher. Interest rates have moved a little bit higher. And we're inching back towards where we were towards the beginning of the year when this thing broke out. Not a good sign for oil, which is in diesel, which is a huge input cost and consumption basically tax. From the standpoint of news, there was an NFIB small business optimism survey that we got that was slightly less than the prior month, but still just over historical averages at 98.7. Remember, we're going to get our fresh read on CPI on Friday and that's probably the biggest news for this week. And I think markets will end up trading back and forth around that until we get that number. And I do believe that'll be a market moving event to see what that number comes in at. But look, on today, we talked a little bit about the jobs number. Remember Friday was the non-farm payroll number and we got a much better than expected number. We got 162,000 jobs created.

2:01When only about half of that was expected 58,000 or less than half of that. So good news there that said the grain of salt to take with it is remember the private numbers were way far lower than expected. And so when you looked at ADP private payrolls of the rebellion numbers, they were a fraction of what the BLS reported as private sector job creation. And there's nothing necessarily sinister about that. Those are two different surveys. They're two different ways of measuring things and they're both fallible and they both have pros and cons with them. And so we look at all the data all the time. But if you looked at current unemployment rate, although we down at 4.1%, and the relatively low level of hiring and firing employment is just still strong. It's still doing well. But at some point seems like it would break one way or the other. But the month of August for this BLS non-farm payroll number didn't do much to change that narrative. In fact, if anything exacerbated it, meaning that we're just still moving along in employment. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

3:02I would say it's a good thing. And it's technically what's giving the Fed the ability to even consider raising rates. Again, I've mentioned this, but there is midterms coming up here right around the corner. The CPI number this Friday, that will be a big factor in what they end up deciding to do. And right now you've got a 60% chance. They're going to raise in September. And there's basically one rate height price did for this year. Anyways, so the question will just be kind of get it done before midterms, would they want to? Well, a wash had the votes inside of the committee, which is very split. Well, we actually get a crack at employment that will cause them to pause. All these were the war change and all these things are just live topics right now. The question that we had today was a client talking and asking about hugging face in the hack recently and how it could have been close to a global crisis. And what are our thoughts around cyber fears and what is the strategy? So on and so forth. Look, I don't view the hugging face incident as a hack that was going to turn into a global crisis, necessarily. But I believe that it cuts both ways.

4:02We've got better technology now better ways to protect against and to have better cybersecurity. Yes. And AI will be on the side of making things better. But then on the other side of that, that same technology can be used by the bad guys to continue to get better. And they certainly are. And unfortunately, it's something we now have to live with much more than we ever had to. I don't know how many listeners on this call have had some sort of fraudulent charge come up on a credit card. But I'm assuming most everyone has because it's so common and frequent and what that's causing is just higher interest rates on credit card companies and higher fees as they have to pay for those things. And ultimately, they just get passed through to us. So the bad guys may or may not be winning, but either way, it ends up costing the consumer in some way, shape, or form. So I don't think that is something that is going to end anytime soon. And like I said, it cuts both ways. The new technology helps the good guys and it helps the bad guys at the same time. And that tension back and forth is not something I see changing over the next decades of our life. Let's call it. We're a little short and sweet, but I appreciate you listening as I always do and appreciate

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