Why does nobody want the stock market when it’s on sale?

By Staci West on 30 October 2026 in Basics

I love a bargain. A good jacket in the sale? Absolutely. And I rarely need much convincing when shoes are involved. And this Black Friday, I’ve got my eye on a new TV. I’ll be the first to admit, I like nice things, I just don’t particularly like overpaying for them. And I know I’m not alone. Tell us the £120 trainers we’ve been watching are now £80 and suddenly they’re practically paying us to buy them. Our favourite moisturiser is 30% off? Better buy three.

But there’s one place where our enthusiasm for lower prices seems to disappear: the stock market.

When markets are rising, investing can feel exciting. When they’re falling, suddenly we want nothing to do with them. And it’s worth talking about, because markets falling are a part of investing. Markets go down, that’s normal. And before you invest a penny, this is something worth getting comfortable with: the stock market will fall.

Not might fall. Will fall.

Over the long term, there will be bad days, corrections, bear markets and periods when your investments are worth less than they were a month or a year earlier. Markets react to recessions, inflation, interest rates, politics, wars, company earnings and countless other factors. That’s why investing involves risk.

That longer-term perspective matters because if you’re investing money for many years, what happens over the next six months is very different from what matters over the next decade. Understanding that before markets fall can make those periods a little easier to live through when they inevitably arrive.

Of course, knowing market falls are normal and actually watching your investments fall are two very different things. If your portfolio is suddenly worth 10% or 20% less, it’s completely understandable that your instinct might be to do something. Sell. Stop investing. Wait until things settle down.

This is where the psychology of investing becomes incredibly important. We’re naturally much happier investing when everything looks positive. Unfortunately, those aren’t necessarily the moments when investments are cheapest. If you want to understand more about why we make the decisions we do with money, and how emotions can affect our investment decisions, our free Psychology of Money course explores exactly this.

Part of being a long-term investor is understanding how much volatility you can genuinely stomach. If a market fall is going to keep you awake at night or make you immediately sell, that could be a sign you’ve taken more investment risk than you’re comfortable with.

Falling markets can also create opportunities

Now let’s turn the Black Friday argument around. When the stock market falls, prices are lower. For somebody with a long investment horizon who is comfortable with the risks involved, that can potentially create a more attractive entry point into the market. It also has an interesting effect if you’re investing regularly.

Imagine you invest £100 every month into the same fund. When a unit costs £10, your £100 buys 10 units. If markets fall and those units now cost £8, your next £100 buys 12.5. You’re investing exactly the same amount, but you’re acquiring more units at the lower price. If markets eventually recover and rise over the years ahead, those additional units participate in that recovery too. This is called pound-cost averaging.

It simply means lower markets aren’t necessarily something investors need to fear. They can also create opportunity.

There’s an obvious response to all of this: why not simply wait? If markets are falling and the headlines are awful, surely it makes sense to hold off until everything settles down? The problem is that markets are forward looking. They don’t necessarily wait for the economy to recover, the uncertainty to disappear and everyone to feel optimistic again before they start rising. By the time everything feels safe, markets may already have recovered significantly.

And unless somebody rings a bell at the bottom (unfortunately, they don’t), knowing exactly when to jump back in is incredibly difficult. That’s one of the benefits of investing regularly. You don’t have to make that call every month. Sometimes you’ll invest at higher prices, sometimes at lower prices, and sometimes somewhere in between.

But the stock market isn’t actually Black Friday

Much to my dismay, there’s one big problem with my shopping analogy. If that TV I’ve been watching drops from £1,000 to £700 on Black Friday, I know exactly what I’m getting. It’s the same TV it was yesterday, just £300 cheaper. A falling stock market isn’t quite so simple.

Economic conditions can change. Expectations for company profits can change. Interest rates can change. The outlook for whole industries can change. And within a falling market, individual companies can be experiencing very different things. So a market falling 20% does not mean that every company within it is now 20% better value. That’s the important distinction between this and a Black Friday sale.

Broad market falls can give long-term investors the opportunity to invest at lower overall prices. But deciding whether an individual company is genuinely undervalued requires a lot more work.

Get comfortable with uncomfortable markets

Investing when everything is going up is the easy bit. The harder part is accepting that falls are inevitable and deciding, before they happen, whether you have the time horizon and appetite for risk to live through them.

Historically, investors have been rewarded over the long term for accepting the ups and downs that come with investing in the stock market. But there are no guarantees about what markets will do next, and recoveries don’t happen to a timetable.

So I’ll happily keep hunting for my discounted TV this Black Friday.

And if markets fall? Rather than automatically seeing that as something to be frightened of, I’ll remember it’s something long-term investors should expect and, sometimes, lower prices are just a new opportunity.