The crash is the course

Summary: The difference between the anxious investor and the calm one isn't intelligence or information. It's experience. This week's reader letters show exactly what that gap looks like and how it gets closed.

When Dhirendra Kumar wrote last week’s Editor’s Note, Crashes are the best classroom, that no book, column, or YouTube video can give you what a real market crash gives you, the inbox didn't disagree. It wrote back with proof.

The responses that came in ranged from the philosophical to the practical, from the confident to the genuinely worried. What emerged, reading them together, was a portrait of an investor community at different stages of the same journey. Some have already earned their crash credentials, and others are getting their education right now, in real time.

The ones who've been here before

The most settled voices in the inbox were the ones with the longest memories.

K Gopinathan, who has been reading Value Research since its earliest days, started investing in stocks and mutual funds back in 1981. The IPOs he bought then are still with him and still doing well. "These market swings don't do much harm," he writes, with the equanimity that only decades in the market seem to produce. His only wistfulness: he wishes he'd had more money to put in.

Vivek Banzal has a similar story. He was in the market during Harshad Mehta's collapse, started SIPs in 2004 after the dotcom bust had settled, and stayed put through 2008. "There is no looking back," he says simply. The compounding paid for his children's education, without a single EMI. He didn't lose sleep in 2020. He's not losing it now.

B P Singh, 80 years old and with 60 per cent of his money still in equity, perhaps put it most plainly: "Your notes have given me the courage to remain in the market and to add to my existing scheme. I am 80 years old, but I don't care."

The ones asking harder questions

Not everyone wrote in to confirm what they already knew. Some came with genuine doubts, and they deserve a serious hearing.

Pinakin Gurjar raises a set of questions that go well beyond the current dip. Is this decline really comparable to 1992, 2000, 2008, and 2020? Or could India be heading into something more like Japan's lost decade, a long, slow cycle rather than a sharp, recoverable fall? He points to the rupee's structural depreciation of 4–5 per cent annually, which he argues erodes real GDP growth significantly. He also flags India's external vulnerabilities: rising global debt, dollar dominance, China's growing weight in the world economy.

These aren't the questions of a panicking investor. They are the questions of someone thinking carefully, and they are worth sitting with, even if the honest answer is that nobody knows for certain.

Virendra Gupta raises a related concern: that not every fall is the same, and that this one might have causes, damage to natural resources, structural global shifts, that don't resolve in the same way previous crises did. "I think this is deep and will lead to a global recession," he writes. He isn't running for the exit, but he isn't dismissing the uncertainty either.

Gajender Pathak worries about the depth of the Indian equity market itself, valuations relative to the US, the quality of management in many listed companies, and whether the market can absorb broader participation without losing its footing.

The quiet ones who just stayed put

And then there are the readers who didn't philosophise; they just held on.

Manoj Ashokan captured the spirit neatly: "Making money through SIP is really a boring process. Just stay invested, ignore the noise, and the temporary crashes."

Praveen Godbole, while reassured by the analysis, makes a practical point worth amplifying: for most ordinary investors, the answer during a crash isn't stock-picking, it's staying in mutual funds and, if possible, adding more.

CA Amitava Dutta sees the column's real audience as the post-Covid cohort, investors who entered the market during an extraordinary bull run and are now encountering their first serious test. "The experiences gained during the three previous significant crashes," he writes, "are a lesson to be learnt by all readers who have not faced such universal market crashes during their investment journey."

The inbox, taken together, reflects exactly the sorting that Dhirendra Kumar described, investors, recognising themselves in one of two groups. The difference between the anxious and the calm isn't intelligence or information. It's experience. And experience, as this week's letters show, is only ever earned the hard way.

Credits

K Gopinathan, Vivek Banzal, B P Singh, Pinakin Gurjar, Virendra Gupta, Gajender Pathak, Manoj Ashokan, Praveen Godbole, CA Amitava Dutta

Every week, the Editor's Note goes out to subscribers. Every week, some of you write back. Keep doing that. It's how stories like this one get made.

Also read: Don’t borrow the market’s panic

This article was originally published on March 30, 2026.