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Stay Calm, Trade Calm: How Practicing Gratitude Can Sharpen Your Stock Market Game

In "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant," Naval flips the script on happiness: it's not something that happens to you after you hit a certain net worth or land the perfect trade. He treats happiness as a skill you can train, and one of his core practices for getting there is practicing gratitude. He frames happiness as "being satisfied with what you have," which means reducing desire and actively appreciating the present moment. In the book, gratitude sits alongside meditation, mindfulness, and limiting unnecessary desires as tools to cultivate a calm, content mindset.

That might sound soft for the cutthroat world of trading, but it’s actually a powerful edge. When your mind is steady, your decisions get cleaner.

Why Gratitude Matters When Money’s on the Line

Trading amplifies emotions. A 3% dip can feel like a personal failure; a 10% run can inflate ego overnight. That emotional rollercoaster is where most traders bleed money—through impulsive sells, FOMO buys, or revenge trades after a loss.

Gratitude acts as an emotional anchor. By regularly noticing what’s already working (a solid plan, capital you can risk, lessons from a past mistake), you reduce the frantic need for the market to “make you whole” right now. That reduction in desire is what Naval points to: less craving → less panic → clearer thinking.

Applying Gratitude to Your Trading Routine

1. Start the Session with a Gratitude Check-In. Before you open charts, take 60 seconds to note 2–3 things you’re grateful for—maybe it’s the fact you have risk capital, a strategy you’ve tested, or simply that you’re healthy enough to trade. This small ritual shifts your nervous system out of threat mode and into a more measured state, so you’re not trading from fear or desperation.
2. Gratitude for Losses as Feedback. Instead of stewing over a losing trade, practice being grateful for the information it gave you. A loss that followed your rules is still a win for discipline. That perspective keeps you from “chasing back” the money and violating your risk limits.
3. Limit Unnecessary Desire. Naval talks about limiting desire. In trading, that looks like capping position sizes, not obsessing over every tick, and resisting the urge to “make up” a month in one day. When you’re satisfied with a 1–2% gain that fits your plan, you avoid overtrading.
4. Mindful Review, Not Rumination. After the market closes, run a brief review: What went according to plan? What didn’t? Pair this with appreciation for what you did well. Mindfulness helps you observe the trade without judgment, and gratitude keeps the review from turning into self-attack.
5. Protect Your Calm Mindset. Meditation and mindfulness, the other practices Naval links to gratitude, are like daily maintenance for your attention. A 5-minute breathing pause before a high-impact news release can be the difference between following your plan and getting swept up in herd behavior.

Bottom line: In the stock market, skill is not just about reading charts. It is about managing the person reading them. Practicing gratitude trains you to take satisfaction in executing your plan, not just in the P&L at the end of the day. That calm, grounded mindset makes it easier to trade probabilities instead of emotions.

In practice, that can show up in simple but meaningful ways. It might mean starting your day with a short gratitude check-in before opening the charts, so you begin from a centered place instead of letting the market immediately pull you into its noise. It can mean viewing a losing trade not as a personal failure, but as useful feedback, especially when you followed your rules. It can mean being content with a smaller gain that fits your plan instead of pressing for more and letting discipline slip. And it can mean reviewing your day honestly without turning every mistake into self-criticism.

The bigger lesson is that gratitude helps protect emotional balance in an environment designed to test it. Markets constantly tempt us to want more, react faster, and chase outcomes we cannot control. Gratitude brings you back to process. It reminds you that the goal is not to force the market to reward you on demand, but to keep making better decisions over time.

From a financial psychology perspective, that matters more than most people realize. The best traders are not simply better at reading charts. They are better at managing their own reactions to uncertainty, volatility, and desire. Gratitude lowers emotional intensity, quiets the urge to chase, and keeps your focus on discipline and probabilities rather than impulse. In that sense, it is more than a personal habit. It is a trading discipline.

Recent Trade Review

One of the trades I focused on recently was a short opportunity in the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), which was identified through our DPT service. The DPT model flagged QQQ as a compelling short setup, and that signal was discussed in last Thursday’s Live Trading Room. It was a good example of how our models help uncover opportunities not just on the long side, but also when market conditions call for a more defensive or tactical approach.

This trade also highlights one of the major differences between our paid and free services. With the paid service, members receive timely SMS alerts that help them know when to get into a trade and when to get out, which can make a major difference when markets are moving quickly. That added speed and clarity is especially important in active trading environments, where timing can be just as critical as the setup itself.

If you would like to review the session and see how the trade was discussed in real time, you can find the recording here: Live Trading Room Recordings

Current Trading Landscape

Stocks spent this week trying to find their footing, but the bigger picture still looked far less stable than a few rebound attempts might have suggested. Under the surface, the market kept running into the same difficult mix of forces: a worsening war involving Iran, severe disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, another surge in oil prices, tariff-related cost pressure, sticky inflation, volatile Treasury yields, and a Federal Reserve that still cannot fully relax. By Friday, that strain was showing up clearly. The S&P 500 had fallen more than 5% from its January record high, the major indexes were headed for another weekly loss, and the market was once again acting like every rally needed a headline to survive.

The dominant story remained the war in Iran and its impact on energy markets. That conflict has now become more than a geopolitical headline. It is a macro transmission mechanism. Earlier in March, Reuters reported that U.S. crude had surged roughly 50% from pre-war levels, a move large enough to immediately change how investors think about inflation, consumer pressure, and Fed policy. This week, those worries intensified again. On Friday, Brent settled at $112.19 and WTI near $98.32, with Reuters tying the latest leg higher to deeper regional escalation, attacks on energy infrastructure, Iraq’s force majeure declaration on foreign-developed oilfields, and additional U.S. military deployment to the region. In other words, this is no longer just a “headline risk” market. Energy is actively feeding back into the inflation and growth equation.

That is also why the market kept producing relief rallies that never fully earned investor trust. Earlier in the conflict, Trump’s March 9 comments that the war was “very complete, pretty much” helped calm markets temporarily, and later talk of possible U.S. Navy escorts for tankers through Hormuz gave traders another reason to cover shorts and buy weakness. But that relief never turned into a full reset, because the underlying uncertainty never actually disappeared. By March 16, Reuters was reporting that several U.S. allies had rebuffed Trump’s call to help escort tankers, and by Friday Trump was saying there were no Iranian leaders left to talk to. That progression tells the story of this tape very well: every hopeful headline has been met by a fresh reminder that the conflict is not truly contained.

At the same time, the macro data did not give investors enough comfort to offset that geopolitical pressure. The Federal Reserve left rates unchanged at 3.5% to 3.75% on March 18 and said it would keep assessing incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks. That message mattered because it reinforced the idea that policymakers are still boxed in. Growth is slowing, but inflation is not cooling fast enough for the Fed to sound supportive. Fourth-quarter GDP was revised down to just 0.7% annualized, a sharp slowdown from 4.4% in the third quarter. February producer prices rose 0.7%, with core final demand less food, energy, and trade services up another 0.5%, while the 12-month increase in headline PPI reached 3.4%. That is not the kind of inflation backdrop that gives the Fed much room to pivot, especially when energy is pushing the wrong way again.

The labor and activity data painted a similarly uneven picture. January job openings were little changed at 6.9 million, suggesting labor demand has not collapsed, but February payrolls had already shown a decline of 92,000 and unemployment ticked up to 4.4%. Weekly initial claims came in at 205,000, which argues against a sudden break in the labor market, but the broader signal is still one of cooling rather than clean strength. Industrial production rose 0.2% in February and manufacturing output also rose 0.2%, which is at least a sign that the industrial side of the economy is still functioning. Housing remains less convincing. Builder confidence edged up only modestly to 38 in March, with affordability still a major problem. Put together, the economy still looks operational, but it no longer looks strong enough to easily absorb a fresh oil shock and higher-for-longer rates at the same time.

Tariffs added another layer of pressure to that same story. Reuters reported earlier this month that steel and aluminum costs, along with tariffs, were helping drive higher manufacturing input prices. That matters because tariffs are not hitting in a vacuum. They are arriving on top of already-elevated energy costs and a more inflation-sensitive environment. You could see that dynamic show up clearly in earnings. Lululemon Athletica said it expects to offset almost all of its U.S. import tariff impact by reducing markdowns and selling more at full price, but it still guided 2026 revenue and profit below expectations, flagged a gross annual tariff impact of about $380 million, and showed just how difficult it is for even strong brands to navigate slower demand and higher cost pressure at the same time.

Technology and AI also told an important story this week, but not the simple bullish story the market told earlier in the year. Micron Technology delivered the kind of results that, in a more forgiving momentum tape, would normally have sparked a cleaner breakout. Reuters reported that Micron forecast third-quarter revenue well above Wall Street expectations on booming AI-memory demand and record earnings, yet the stock still fell after the company said it was increasing capital spending by another $5 billion. Jabil showed the other side of the same trade. It raised its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast to $34 billion from $32.4 billion and lifted adjusted EPS guidance to $12.25 from $11.55 on strong AI data-center demand. The takeaway is not that the AI trade is dead. It is that this market has become much more demanding. Investors still want real secular growth, but they are scrutinizing spending, margins, and execution far more aggressively than they were when liquidity and momentum were doing more of the work.

That shift in tone also helps explain the broader market psychology. With the VIX back in the mid-20s and the indexes testing major moving-average support, this is not a panic tape, but it is clearly not a comfortable one either. Friday’s session was another reminder of that, as the VIX rose to 26.4 while nine of the eleven S&P sectors fell. Energy was a major exception, rising again and moving toward a thirteenth straight weekly gain, which underscores how narrow leadership has become. Meanwhile, rising yields continued to make the situation harder for equities. Reuters reported that the U.S. 10-year yield climbed to 4.386% on Friday, its highest since last summer, as investors rapidly dialed back rate-cut expectations and even began to price in some chance the Fed could be forced to tighten again if the inflation shock deepens. That is exactly the type of backdrop that makes broad rallies harder to sustain and puts more pressure on long-duration growth and rate-sensitive sectors.

That is why I remain in the market-neutral camp. The long-term trend is still intact, and I still believe the SPY can eventually work toward the 700 to 720 zone if inflation cools, yields settle down, and the geopolitical premium fades. But right now momentum has deteriorated enough that caution deserves a real seat at the table. The biggest risk remains that interest rates stay higher for longer while unemployment indicators continue to drift up. If that happens, the market becomes even more selective, failed breakouts become more common, and stock picking matters much more than broad exposure. In the near term, I continue to view the 620 to 650 area on SPY as the key support zone for the next few months. If that holds, this can still be treated as a difficult correction within a broader uptrend. If it starts to give way under the combined pressure of war, oil, tariffs, sticky inflation, and softer labor data, then we are likely dealing with a much more rotational and frustrating market than many investors still want to admit.

The biggest takeaway from this week is that this is no longer an easy tape. It is not a market where you can assume every dip will bounce cleanly or that strong stories automatically get rewarded. This is a more skill-based environment now. Process matters more. Discipline matters more. Quality matters more. There are still opportunities, especially in areas backed by real earnings strength and durable secular demand, but until oil, yields, and inflation stop pulling against growth at the same time, I think it makes sense to stay selective and keep a more neutral stance.

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Sector Spotlight

Sometimes the market tells you exactly where leadership is shifting, but only if you are willing to stop looking where it used to be and start looking where real strength is beginning to show up.

This week was a perfect example. While investors spent much of their attention focused on falling momentum in the broader indexes, rising volatility, and the pressure that higher-for-longer rates continue to place on growth names, one corner of the market kept standing out for a very different reason. It was not being driven by speculative enthusiasm or multiple expansion. It was being driven by real-world urgency, supply disruption, pricing power, and a macro backdrop that suddenly made its relevance impossible to ignore.

As the war involving Iran intensified and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained severely disrupted, oil once again became one of the market’s most important signals. Crude surged, volatility picked up, and investors were forced to reprice inflation, rate expectations, and geopolitical risk all at once. In an environment like that, sectors tied directly to global supply stress and commodity pricing tend to move from being background players to becoming central market drivers.

That shift mattered even more because the rest of the market was not offering much clarity. Treasury yields remained volatile, the VIX hovered around 25, and the major indexes were trading near important technical areas with conviction fading. At the same time, earnings reactions in other leadership groups showed just how selective this tape has become. Even strong AI-related stories such as Micron and Jabil were met with tougher scrutiny, while tariff pressure and macro uncertainty weighed on consumer-facing names like Lululemon. In other words, this is no longer a market where investors can simply chase old winners and expect broad participation to carry everything higher.

That is what makes this space so compelling right now. It is one of the few areas benefiting directly from the very forces causing stress elsewhere. Higher oil prices, tighter global supply, and rising geopolitical premiums all support a stronger backdrop for the companies most directly tied to the energy chain. In a market that has become more defensive, more selective, and more macro-sensitive, that kind of direct earnings tailwind matters.

The sector I am talking about is Energy, and for investors looking for broad exposure, The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE) remains one of the cleanest ways to express that view. XLE gives investors diversified exposure to the major players benefiting from this shift, while also offering a practical way to participate in a sector that has re-emerged as one of the market’s most relevant leadership groups. In a tape where broad market momentum has deteriorated and stock picking matters more, XLE stands out as a way to lean into relative strength without having to overcomplicate the trade.

Trade of the Week

This week, the stock I am adding to my portfolio is Valero Energy Corporation (VLO).

Valero stands out here because it offers one of the clearest ways to capitalize on the current energy backdrop without relying solely on upstream production exposure. While the broader market is wrestling with war-driven oil volatility, inflation pressure, and weakening momentum, refiners like Valero can benefit from exactly the kind of dislocation we are seeing now. When crude markets become stressed and the global energy complex gets disrupted, refiners often move into a more attractive position as pricing, product spreads, and refining economics all come into sharper focus.

That setup looks especially compelling right now. This week’s trading made it clear that energy is one of the few areas attracting consistent relative strength while other sectors struggle to hold rallies. Oil remained one of the market’s dominant macro stories, and every new development tied to Iran, tanker traffic, or supply disruptions kept reinforcing the same message: energy risk is not fading quickly. That creates a more supportive backdrop for companies like Valero that are positioned to benefit from elevated product demand and a tighter energy environment.

There is also an important market-structure reason to like VLO here. In a tape where investors are becoming far more selective, individual names need a clear catalyst and a durable earnings story. Valero has both. It sits in a part of the market backed by real cash flow, real demand, and real macro relevance. This is not a story stock. It is a company tied to one of the few sectors currently being pushed forward by actual fundamental pressure rather than hope alone.

From a trading perspective, VLO also fits the kind of market we are in now. With the VIX elevated, yields volatile, and the major indexes losing momentum, I want exposure to names that can hold up even if the broader market stays choppy. Valero gives me that. If oil remains firm, if supply disruptions persist, or if investors continue rotating away from more crowded and rate-sensitive trades, VLO has room to continue working higher. And if the market remains locked in this more defensive, selective regime, energy leadership could continue to broaden from here.

That is why VLO is my Trade of the Week. It is tied directly to one of the market’s strongest current themes, supported by this week’s geopolitical and commodity backdrop, and positioned in a sector that is showing far more resilience than the broader tape. In a market that is demanding quality, discipline, and real catalysts, Valero checks the right boxes.

This week, I am adding Valero Energy Corporation (VLO) to my portfolio.

And one more thing! Our track record speaks for itself from the standpoint of a Winning Trades Percentage, Average Return Per Trade, and Net Gain. Just take a look:

The consistent performance of our services is just incredible. My historical stellar performance is made possible by being right on 82.32% of all trades that I made, with an average profit of 39.29% per trade on our collective trade recommendations. To my knowledge, this trading performance is one-of-a-kind and stands alone in the marketplace for superior trading advice, where our numbers and results speak for themselves.

As we approach Q2 2026, the market is becoming increasingly selective beneath an otherwise steady surface, with geopolitical tensions, tariff swings, and uneven megacap earnings shaping a more cautious tone. Interest rates have re‑emerged as a defining force as inflation expectations remain sticky, and labor market data is beginning to soften at the edges—creating a landscape where disciplined, data‑driven decision‑making matters more than ever. This is exactly where YellowTunnel becomes essential: our AI‑powered tools help you cut through noise, identify high‑probability setups, and stay aligned with the strongest pockets of market leadership. As conditions tighten and leadership narrows, YellowTunnel gives you the clarity and structure needed to navigate Q2 with confidence and precision.

Whether you’re focused on real-time trade opportunities, advanced analysis, or developing a disciplined trading mindset, we’ve got the tools and insights to guide you. As the year unfolds, let's work together to make 2025 the most profitable year for your portfolio. But remember—successful investing starts with informed decisions. Always conduct thorough research and assess your risk tolerance before executing any trades.

Let’s make this year a transformative one for your financial growth!

One more thing, I've had the opportunity to take additional action with a great organization supporting families in Ukraine directly. Gate.org is a foundation where fundraising is held for specific families, allocating funds to multiple families currently living in Ukraine. I am on the board of directors for this great initiative and encourage everyone to check it out and donate if possible. The war in Ukraine is escalating, and families are being negatively impacted and displaced daily. To learn more about this initiative to help families, please see the link below:

 www.gate.org

Wishing you a week filled with resilience, growth, and prosperous opportunities!