Keep Going, Even When It Doesn’t Make Sense

There are days when markets pretend to be rational. And then there are days like this, when they remind us, they are anything but. Walt Whitman, who died on this day in 1892, understood something investors consistently forget: meaning is rarely visible at first glance. The American poet, journalist, and essayist—often called the father of free verse for his first book of poetry Leaves of Grass—was less interested in answers than in endurance. “The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first… be not discouraged, keep on,” he wrote. It is not a bad framework for parsing the tape this week. Because what, exactly, are we meant to make of the on again off again relief rallies?

We opened the week with sense of reassurance, President Trump suggested Iran was ready to deal. Oil softened, equities exhaled, and for a brief moment, the machinery of global markets clicked back into its preferred fiction: that geopolitics can be managed, priced, and ultimately, ignored. But relief, as usual, proved fleeting. 

By midweek, the narrative had imploded. No negotiations, no clarity. Only escalation risk. The possibility set widened again, uncomfortably so: anything from a quiet diplomatic off-ramp to a direct strike on Kharg Island, the artery through which much of Iran’s oil flows. That is not a rounding error. That is systemic. It’s here where Whitman’s observation lands with force.

Markets, like nature, are not linear systems. They are adaptive, emotional, often opaque. The mistake is assuming that volatility is noise rather than signal. The real signal isn’t oil ticking up or down on any given headline. It’s the growing dependence of price action on political improvisation. When policy begins to track crude in real time, you don’t have stability; you have reflex.

So, investors oscillate between two incompatible narratives: one of orderly resolution, the other of sudden rupture. Both cannot be true, but both must be priced. This is the uncomfortable middle, where conviction is scarce and positioning is 100% tactical. 

Whitman would say: keep going. Not because clarity is imminent, but because it rarely is. The discipline isn’t in predicting the outcome. It is in navigating the incomprehensible without mistaking it for order.