The awesome truth: Your good fortune is due to both your gut instinct and an educated guess as a gamer that this company displayed foresight — and pursued excellence. In 2018, Ryan Shrout, the founder and lead analyst at Shrout Research, wrote on MarketWatch about Nvidia’s next-generation graphics architecture. Despite competition from bigger rivals, Shrout wrote, “Nvidia continues to ship products with leadership performance and penetration. Even Google GOOG GOOGL is using Nvidia graphics chips for its cloud-based AI inference systems, proving that Nvidia is doing while most others are simply trying to.”

Honest retail investors who made successful once-in-a-lifetime bets in the other six members of the “Magnificent Seven” group of stocks — Apple, Microsoft MSFT, Alphabet, Amazon AMZN, Meta META and Tesla TSLA — will tell you what you told me: They bought the stock on a hunch or because they noticed something special about the company’s products or philosophy. Of course, you’re more likely to get lucky with a long-term investment: 14 hours or days may be a long time in politics, but 14 years is a short time for many investors in the stock market.

The upshot: Instinct is a powerful tool — especially when you’re proved right. You’re not the first person to buy a company’s stock because you like one of their products. Have you ever used a BlackBerry BB? I did not find them to be an easy or intuitive device to use, and I never understood their appeal. Mine stayed in the box. It was subsequently upstaged by a new device called the iPhone AAPL. So yes, not liking a company’s products may be one reason to avoid the stock — or vice versa. As obvious as it may seem, it can also be useful to look at a company’s financials and price-earnings ratio before committing your hard-earned cash.

You took a bet on one stock and, while you went against all the rules of diversification, you had perhaps once-in-lifetime luck with the explosion of artificial intelligence. But you also had an inkling that this company was doing something special, even if you did not foresee the exact nature of the stock’s meteoric rise — or that, in the words of DataTrek cofounder Nick Colas, Nvidia would “become, quite literally, the single most important company in the world to global equity investors.”

Financial advisers, for better or for worse, have all sorts of methods for choosing stocks — such as fundamental analysis or technical analysis — but there are no guarantees, even for the most forensic stock picker. And history is littered with bad calls. “Fundamental analysis attempts to identify stocks offering strong growth potential at a good price,” says Charles Schwab SCHW. “Investors have traditionally used fundamental analysis for longer-term trades, relying on metrics like earnings per share (EPS), price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, P/E growth, and dividend yield.”

Schwab continues: “Technical analysis, on the other hand, bypasses the underlying company’s fundamentals and instead looks for statistical patterns on stock charts that might foretell future price moves. The idea here is that stock prices already reflect all the publicly available information about a particular company, so there’s nothing to be gained from poring over a balance sheet, income statement, or other financial information. Given the focus on price and volume moves, traders have traditionally used technical analysis for shorter-term trades.”

What were your objectives in buying this stock? Long-term growth? Capitalizing on a hot trend? Making a quick buck? Or did you merely want a foothold in the stock market with a $4,000 investment in your future and a shot at something less tangible — something that was in short supply after the traumatic experience with your former manager — a chance at a better future? Buying low is only the beginning: Riding the stock’s volatility, and resisting cashing out as the price slowly climbed before finally exploding. That takes chutzpah, nerves of steel and self-restraint, so give yourself credit for that.

You put your life savings in one stock, a risky move, but it paid off. God works in mysterious ways and, sometimes, so does the S&P 500 SPX.

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