A lot of the market’s lingering anxiety can be traced back to a basic logical fallacy. Investors think all the twists and turns over the past few years cancel out, leaving all the progress stocks have made in the meantime unearned and illusory. But that simply isn’t true.

Big companies have come a long way since pre-pandemic times. And these aren’t really the kind of gains that are a figment of the Fed’s imagination. They weren’t conjured up by zero rates and they won’t evaporate now that debt once again costs money.

We talked last week about earnings climbing significantly between late 2019 and now, which basically brackets all of the shocks of the COVID era to focus on a simple question: are companies making more or less money today than they were the last time the world felt “normal” four years ago?

The answer last week was a resounding “yes.” Earnings plunged in the initial pandemic lockdowns, soared in the stimulus that followed and are now dipping again, but the end-to-end journey remains positive.

And as every investor knows, when earnings are increasing, stocks follow sooner or later. That’s what’s happened. While the S&P 500 might not deserve the stretched valuations it got in the free money era, it also doesn’t deserve to drop all the way to 2019 levels either.

In other words, the negativity got out of control just like the greed. Somewhere in the middle, reality takes over . . . and the market is still in the middle, which means it deserves to be roughly where it is.

But I know that it can be hard to trust the bottom line after years of turmoil. The numbers can be “adjusted” to give Wall Street what we want, right?

That’s why I always check the earnings trends against long-term revenue. You can tweak the bottom line from time to time in the short term through “restructuring” and layoffs and other accounting moves, but unless there’s cash coming in, there’s only so much the accountants can do.

And cash has been coming into the S&P 500 at a healthy pace. Revenue is easily up 30% since the end of 2018 . . . counting what looks like a slight dip this year into the math.

Of course the gains aren’t evenly distributed. A lot of companies took a big hit in the lockdowns and have yet to really recover. But across the market as a whole, a lot of progress has still been made. This is the new normal. It only feels depressed because inflation makes everyone miserable.

And if the top line is that robust, it takes a substantial drag from interest rates or inflation or a slowing economy to push profit in the wrong direction. Guess what? Even with all those pain points in play, the S&P 500 is still finding ways to turn 11.4% of all revenue into profit.

Back in 2018, that margin was only 11.2%. Think back five years if you can. Were you convinced that Corporate America was teetering over a precipice? Whether you were bullish or bearish then, the world actually looks better right now.

The only question is whether that situation lasts. It never does. There’s always a recession months or maybe a few years out over the horizon.

But is it likely to be the kind of recession that blows a 30% hole in everybody’s sales curve? Vanishingly unlikely. Not even the lockdowns did that. Not even the credit crash of 2008 did that.

It’s going to take a lot of disaster to take all or even most of the market’s post-COVID progress away. That’s basic fundamental truth. And I think a lot of investors are already looking ahead, toward the next boom.

The rest of us can still buy the dip. Revenue might dip 1% this year across the S&P 500. Unless margins completely blow out, that means stocks are at worst worth 1% less than they were a year ago.

And that’s the worst scenario. Remember, every three months, Corporate America pushes the goal posts with every earnings report. Throughout most of history, that reset takes us forward. Even when it sets us back, it doesn’t do it long.

Stocks don’t always go up. That’s a myth left over from the zero-money euphoria days. But over time, the market as a whole tends to point up at a healthy 8-11% a year.

If that’s good enough for you, feel free to buy the market as a whole and hang on for the long haul. Otherwise, I suggest getting a little selective in terms of both the stocks you own and the periods in which you buy and sell. Active traders can make more than 8-11% a year over time. A lot more.

But it takes work and a little skill. Your call. The only real way to lose is to hide your money under the bed and let inflation (even if the Fed gets it back down to 2% a year) eat your wealth alive.