Should you stop your SIPs during a market fall?

Summary: Market falls often make SIP investors question whether staying invested still makes sense. This story explains the hidden logic of what really changes during a downturn, and why the answer is often less about fear and more about understanding how SIPs actually work. A market fall is a price decline, not a verdict on whether a systematic investment plan (SIP) is ‘working’. For investors, this means the real question is not whether falling markets feel uncomfortable, but whether stopping the SIP breaks the very averaging process it was meant to use. That matters because SIPs remain a mainstream investing route in India. A useful starting point is to understand the basics of investing through SIPs. The anxiety, of course, is real. Value Research’s piece, ‘The worst time to stop your SIP feels perfectly logical’, captures the behavioural pattern neatly: investors feel confident when portfolios rise, but the urge to pause appears when markets turn volatile. That impulse usually shows up just when the SIP mechanism is beginning to do its hardest work. What a falling SIP actually changes A falling market reduces the fund’s net asset value or NAV, which

This article was originally published on July 05, 2022, and last updated on March 16, 2026.