Since it’s the Thanksgiving weekend, I’d like to dwell for a moment on the concept of gratitude. Think about all you have and all the market has given you. Is your primary response one of gratitude or fear that the market that gave you all of this will take it away?

As I write this, the S&P 500 is up a healthy 19% YTD. If you’re in the NASDAQ, you’ve rebounded 47% over the same period. The wounds from the serious bear market of 2022 have almost entirely healed, just like every bear market before that.

We’re barely a good week or two away from stocks trading at record levels again. At that point in the Wall Street cycle, every single person who ever bought the market in the past has made money. We’re all winners.

Questions then start circulating around how much money is “enough” and whether we’re booking profit at a fast enough rate to meet our income requirements, much less keep up with our friends and closest rivals. That’s a FOMO discussion that revolves around envy and greed.

And if you’re still terrified after watching the NASDAQ in particular soar back to its former glory, you were probably terrified across the past year. What did those threats amount to? If you bought Big Tech in January, it will take a 30% crash to take you back to breakeven . . . and an even worse disaster to leave you with a loss.

I’m not saying the economy looks great right now or that every stock deserves its recent gains. And I’m not even saying I would buy a lot of stocks at this level. But when the market gives you a gift, sometimes it’s best not to ask a lot of questions.

You say “thank you.” You feel good about the windfall. Maybe you feel clever and confident if you’ve earned it. Maybe you just feel lucky. Blessed.

And if you can feel grateful, that feeling in my experience tends to crowd out fear. It’s more like relief. The threat didn’t hit you. You’re alive and still in the market. You can trade another day.

There’s no wrong answer here. If fear controls your every move, you’re either out of the market or you’re both incredibly disciplined and fairly unhappy. My advice: stay in as long as you can, but when it’s time to go, take your money and don’t come back.

The rest of us will be riding the market rollercoaster. Sometimes we scream with surprise and anxiety. Sometimes we laugh with relief and the thrill of it all.

Either way, the market glass is either half empty or it’s half full. Or more accurately, it’s always half full of profit and half full of loss. Our job is to maximize the profit, one percentage point at a time, while not letting the persistent losses bother us too much.

My GameChangers, for example, just had to eat a position that cost them 37% in the past month alone. Good earnings on a bad day. I love the company but don’t regret the initial buy recommendation.

We had to take the shot. If we don’t swing at a few pitches, we’ll never get anywhere. And some of those pitches will always be bad ones. No investor is ever perfect, much as no baseball player ever hits 1.00 unless it’s a one-pitch career and then we quit at the peak of our glory.

Our other swings have been fantastic. One of them is up 60% this month. If we’d cut it loose before earnings, we wouldn’t have gotten any of this. If we’d never bought it at all, we’d be significantly poorer.

Another stock in that portfolio is up a lowly 49% in the same period of time. Similar logic. In any portfolio that contains those two winners and the 37% loser, we’re still up 27% in the aggregate. The glass is at least two-thirds full.

Throw in our positions in the middle of the spectrum and the GameChangers strategy has earned 14.75% so far this month. That’s a lot to be thankful for . . . almost double what the S&P 500 has been able to deliver.

Do I feel threatened that the market will take all that away? Right now we have so much profit piled up in that portfolio that it will take weeks to take us back to ground zero, assuming of course that the downturn comes too fast to lock in our gains in the meantime.

That’s how I ended the dot-com crash with more money than when I had when the boom started. A lot more money. The full side of the glass was a lot bigger than the empty side. The boom was bigger than the bust.

And that’s how the world works. The busts can only send you back to zero. You pick yourself up and start over. The booms can go on forever, rack up hundreds of points of profit.

The only limit is the amount of time you’re willing to defy fear. Gratitude helps. If you have a small win, focus on it. See if you can duplicate it. Grow it. Turn it into a system.

Find out why it’s working when other trades fizzle. And you’ll find the wins get easier.

Guess what? It’s getting easier. We’ve survived just about every headwind Wall Street can throw at us: the worst Fed cycle in a generation, runaway inflation, war overseas, Washington gridlock, a bona fide earnings recession if not a mainstream economic crash, broken bond yields, the biggest bank failures since 2008.

From here, rates have essentially peaked. Inflation is fading. Earnings are growing again. The banks will get some relief soon. And bond yields may go up, but believe it or not, that’s not the end of the world.