Why the Stock Market Always Comes Back

I want to tell you about a room full of people who all raised their hand at 9 a.m. when asked if they have money in the stock market.

That was the scene at the 2026 EconoMe Conference in Cincinnati. A few hundred money and personal finance nerds, some still desperately clutching their morning coffee after what I’m pretty sure was a late night at the pre-party and the hotel bar, gathered in that auditorium ready to talk about that thing that most people don’t wanna talk about. Ya know, money!

If you haven’t heard of EconoMe, let me give you the quick version. It’s the only large-scale event specifically designed for the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) movement, and it’s a three-day party about money held at the University of Cincinnati. I like to think of it as a party about how to live your best life! The conference was founded by Diania Merriam, who discovered the FIRE movement and used that knowledge to get out of $30,000 of debt in 11 months, started saving and investing 60% of her income, and eventually retired from her corporate career at 33. The vibe is part conference, part community reunion, and part group therapy for people who think index funds are exciting dinner conversation. My kind of people! Lol. 

So… back to the opening session. It was led by Brian Feroldi. If you’re not familiar with Brian, he’s a financial educator, YouTuber, and author, and his career mission is literally “to demystify the stock market.” He’s written over thousands articles on stocks, investing, and personal finance for The Motley Fool, and in 2022, published his best-selling book “Why Does the Stock Market Go Up?” The guy knows his stuff, and more importantly, he knows how to explain it without making your eyes glaze over. His talk was the first session of the day. And what he said is something I think every investor needs to hear, especially right now. Actually, I think every high school student ever should hear and learn this! 

The Sick Feeling in Your Stomach Is the Problem

Brian opened by asking the room to keep their hands raised if they’d held their position through one of the recent market downturns. There were a lot of hands still in the air. We’ve had some big ones in recent years. A nearly 20% drop tied to tariff concerns. The inflation-driven dip before that. COVID in 2020. And a lot of peeps in that room, remember the throat punch of 2008.

Ya know, one of those moments when your net worth was visibly and rapidly shrinking. Your brain starts whispering, “Maybe this is it. Maybe this time it doesn’t come back.”

Brian called that feeling out by name: FEAR!

And I really like how he continued to talk about how fear of the stock market, just like any other fear! Right?! Most of the time this comes from not understanding. So, you’re not scared of the drop itself. Right? !You’re scared because you don’t know if or why it comes back up.

So, just think about that for a second. The going-down part is kinda always obvious. There’s like a war or conflict somewhere. Maybe a f’n global pandemic or financial crisis. Or some political bullshit and policy shock. The news will almost always explain the downside to you in exhausting detail. However, what nobody teaches you is the actual mechanism behind the recovery. So, without that knowledge, every downturn feels like it might be the last one. Noooooo!

A Plane, a Physics Lesson, and a Better Way to Invest

This is where Brian did something I really loved. He continued to tell a story about his childhood fear of flying. As a kid, he didn’t understand why the airplane stayed in the air. I mean, sure, gravity made sense. The going-down force and crashing to the ground was intuitive. But what was fighting it? What was the wizard magic that kept planes in the air that he was just supposed to trust with his life. That unknowing was the source of the fear.

As he got older and then learned two basic principles from physics class, everything kinda changed. The first was Newton’s third law. This law of physics is for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The wing shape forces air downward, and the wing gets pushed up. The Next was Bernoulli’s principle. This is the principle that faster-moving air creates lower pressure, so the shape of the wing creates lift by generating a high-pressure zone below and a low-pressure zone above the wing.

Suddenly, flying wasn’t some kind of unknown mystical magic. It was physics. And once he understood the physics, he stopped being scared. Well…mostly. He’s still sometimes freaks out with turbulence.  Brian mapped that exact same framework onto the stock market. The going-down is almost always  explainable. World wars, terrorist attacks, supply shocks, and pandemics right?! The history books are full of catastrophes And yet, as Brian put it, in every single case, the market came back stronger. So, the question is: why?

The Two Core Principles That Explain Everything

Brian built the rest of his talk around two big ideas. And these are the things nobody told you in school, seriously! Like, even though you’re betting your entire financial future on them It’s f’n not taught in schools.

Principle One: Stocks Follow Earnings

A stock price, over time, typically reflects things like earnings, or profits, of the company it represents. That’s it. That’s basically the whole thing.

When the downturns hits, most companies don’t just give up and throw their hands up. They often adapt. They do things like cut costs. They may reduce production lines, or trim marketing budgets, and figure out how to run leaner. It can totally be painful. I mean people lose their f’n jobs and Businesses close! But the companies that DO survive come out the other side more efficient, better positioned to turn revenue into profit when demand returns. They are able to do more with less! Earnings almost always recover because human ingenuity and the drive to build profitable businesses doesn’t stop because the economy gets rough. It adjusts.

Principle Two: Downturns Are a Cleansing Process

Okay this one is totally counterintuitive but powerful. Recessions don’t just hurt bad businesses. They can eliminate them.

Companies that were barely surviving in good times get wiped out when things go south. And when they go away all together, their customers don’t then disappear. The customers, most likely go somewhere else. When Blockbuster went under, people didn’t stop watching movies at home. They found Netflix right?! Market share shifts from weak players to strong ones, and the overall ecosystem gets healthier.

There are three more forces that help fuel recovery, and I think these are worth touching on.  Government intervention often kicks in and almost immediately. The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for example. This then drops borrowing costs for businesses and drives market activity back up. And when things get really, really bad, fiscal stimulus from Washington can pour hundreds of billions into the economy to help soften the landing.

Innovation totally spikes during hard times. The recession of the early 1990s pushed companies to adopt more efficient and faster workflows with computers and technology, which helped birth the internet and the cell phone era. The dot-com bust of the early 2000s built out high-speed fiber across the country, enabling e-commerce and smartphones. The Recession of 2008 laid the groundwork for SaaS business like Uber, Airbnb, as well as clean energy. Let’s not forget COVID. As brutal as it was, it accelerated remote work and the data center investment that is now totally fueling the AI revolution. Downturns in the market force innovation forward.

Wrapping Up

The antidote to financial fear is financial understanding. You don’t conquer the fear of flying by white-knuckling the armrest on every flight. You conquer the fear by learning why the plane stays up. Same goes for investing. You don’t hold through a crash by just gritting your teeth and hoping. You hold because you understand, at a foundational level, why the market always recovers.

Horns up \m/ \m/