Good Evening:

In times of uncertainty, Abraham Lincoln quoted lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” Hamlet is acknowledging that there are many things outside of his control. The point is that much of life, and markets, is shaped by chance and accident, which is why it’s a good idea to not always have fixed plans. Lincoln would later elaborate with this analogy that he used to explain his course on Reconstruction: “The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it—setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see; and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem.”

What Lincoln was implying: Amid the turbulence of the Civil War, and with much out of his control, his best approach was to focus on the few things over which he did have power, namely his temperament, messaging, and decision making. The former president probably would have liked how the novelist and playwright E.L. Doctorow thought about steering his course on writing: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

It isn’t all that different with challenging markets: Steer from point to point...

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