The last few weeks have been a test of Wall Street’s nerve. On one hand, the world looks pretty good on paper, with the S&P 500 once again nudging intraday records and the Fed less and less likely to push interest rates any farther into the pain zone.

But after the last few years of endless shocks and day-to-day volatility, few seem willing or able to trust the evidence of their own eyes. They’re still in bear market mode, convinced that someone is playing a cruel joke and the gains will be snatched away at any moment.

Will the end come in the form of a sudden recession? Soaring bond yields? A wave of bankruptcies as companies that can handle interest rates now finally falter and implode?

All these are possible but unlikely. The data point in the other direction. And so those who can’t shake the feeling that they need to sell their stocks keep looking for a reason to sell.

I see that web searches for “black swan” have quadrupled in the past month. People are looking over their shoulder for hints that a metaphorical asteroid — a disaster — is hurtling toward the market.

They shouldn’t worry. Any black swan everyone is searching for either doesn’t exist or isn’t a true “black swan” event after all. When we’re all paying attention, it’s no surprise.

And when we aren’t surprised, we’re prepared. Wall Street has already priced in all the risk factors we know about. Russia has been at war with Ukraine for years now. Israel has been fighting for months. U.S. politics remain dysfunctional at best.

A recession has been “imminent” for over a year. The yield curve is messed up. The Fed has already engaged in the most aggressive rate campaign in a generation. Corporate earnings went down throughout 2023. And so on and on.

We’ve already braced for those gloomy scenarios. Some came true and some didn’t. But any black swan you see coming from a long way away isn’t going to come as a shock to the system. It’s just bad news that gives you time to dodge, deflect or otherwise get out of the way.

Human beings get out of the way. We pivot out of vulnerable stocks and asset classes, parking our money in something that might offer a better defense or even make money in disruptive periods. We don’t simply sit and watch passively while the asteroid approaches.

And here’s the thing: there’s zero point in betting on the asteroid. You can hedge your investments to the point where they’ll survive the equivalent of an extinction event . . . but how will you cash out if that gloomy scenario plays out as predicted?

You can’t. There’s no winner. If the market collapses and doesn’t recover, there’s no point in any of this. If we want to be investors, we have to invest in some vision of the future where life goes on more or less as it does now or even gets better.

Maybe the asteroid hits. A true black swan event comes out of nowhere and hits us all when we’re not paying attention. Game over. In that scenario, none of us will need to check our retirement account balances.

But here’s why I’m talking about asteroids. In the Fed meeting transcripts from 2018 released this week, we learned that Randal Quarles, who chaired the central bank’s Financial Stability Board, loved joking about the perspective that sees fatal planet-ending asteroids everywhere.

He made the joke four separate times in the year to relieve tension around doomsday scenarios:

“Foreign experiences with prolonged yield curve inversions — of which there have been, somewhat to my surprise, quite a few — was interesting, and apparently in none of those cases did the Earth get hit by an asteroid.”

“George W. Bush said he was going to ignore the WTO. The effect on the U.S. economy was negative, but mildly negative. The Earth did not get hit by an asteroid. And after a year and a half, the tariffs were removed.”

“It’s heartening to confirm that the markets were able to adjust to such a momentous change in the statement language [adding “remains accommodative”] without the earth being hit by an asteroid.”

“Are the same drivers of reduced standards in the underwriting of the loans also leading to an evolution of a weakening in the structure of the entities into which they are ultimately being sold? And, there, the staff presentation indicated that we’re not seeing a lot of evidence that that is happening. But there are some gaps in our knowledge, and there is an increase in the amount of these that are being held in mutual funds. Those are less stable structures. I mean, it didn’t look like, again, a dramatic ‘earth getting hit by an asteroid’ increase.”

Needless to say, there was no asteroid in 2018. That was 5-6 years ago. We survived. Scan the skies all you want, but if you’re an investor, keep an eye on the market. That should be your focus.