The Market Just Crashed 30%. Here Is the Exact Reason You Should Not Sell Your XEQT
November 2, 2026
Do not sell. A 30% crash in XEQT is a paper loss, and it only becomes a permanent loss if you sell, because the fund owns roughly 9,000 companies that keep earning money whether or not you are watching the price. Selling also forces you to make a second correct decision, which is when to buy back in, and very few investors get that one right. Everything below is the arithmetic behind that answer, and it is arithmetic, not motivation.
You Already Knew XEQT Could Drop This Hard
XEQT is 100% stocks. There is no bond cushion, no guaranteed floor, and no promise from BlackRock that the ride will be smooth. Our own explainer on the “Just Buy XEQT” mantra says it plainly, that market crashes can mean 30% to 50% drawdowns and that the strategy only works if you do not panic sell. You read that, or something like it, before you bought.
The drops are already in the fund’s record. BlackRock’s published calendar-year returns show XEQT down 10.93% in 2022, then up 17.05% in 2023, up 24.67% in 2024 and up 20.45% in 2025. In early 2020, stocks fell sharply over a matter of weeks and then recovered within months. Those are not different funds failing in different ways. That is one fund doing what a 100% stock fund does.
As of November 2026, XEQT trades near $44.64, with a 52-week range of $38.60 to $46.48. A 30% fall from that $46.48 high would put the price around $32.54. If you are staring at a number like that right now, it feels like a malfunction. It is the price of admission. Stocks have paid higher long-run returns than GICs precisely because they can do this to you, and that return only reaches the people who are still holding when the recovery arrives.
The Actual Risk Isn’t the Crash. It’s Selling Into It.
For a long-term investor, risk is the permanent loss of capital or failing to meet your retirement goals. It is not the daily fluctuation in your balance. We make the same argument in our piece on why XEQT does not hedge currency, where mistaking volatility for risk is the central trap. A 30% drop is volatility. Turning it into cash is what makes it permanent.
One poster in the r/JustBuyXEQT community put it more bluntly than any advisor would. Unless you sold your shares, you did not lose the money. Your balance is lower, but you still own the same slice of the same 9,000 companies. The earnings, the dividends and the share count have not changed. Only the price people are willing to pay today has changed, and the price is the most emotional number in the entire system.
A crash is a price you can see. A sale is a loss you choose. Only one of them is permanent.
I cannot tell you how long a recovery takes. Past ones have taken anywhere from a few months to a few years, and anyone who gives you a date is guessing. What I can point to is the last real bear market. One recent investing column estimated that portfolios holding 85% to 90% stocks have likely about doubled since the October 2022 low, an annualized return near 19%. The people who captured that doubling were not smarter. They were still invested.
What Happens When You Sell XEQT Right Now?
You lock in the full 30% loss, then you need to guess correctly when to re-enter. Take a $100,000 position that has fallen to $70,000. If you hold, you need a 43% gain just to get back to $100,000. If you sell, you are sitting in $70,000 of cash, and you need to be right again before the rebound happens. A rebound of 80% off the low would take the held portfolio to $126,000 while the cash sits at $70,000 plus a little interest. That is a $56,000 gap, created by one click.
The real-world version uses numbers you can check. Suppose you held $100,000 of XEQT at the start of 2022 and sold on the last day of that year after the 10.93% loss, leaving you $89,070. Someone who simply held through BlackRock’s reported returns of 17.05%, 24.67% and 20.45% would have about $156,600 by the end of 2025. The seller would have about $89,070 plus whatever a savings account paid. The difference is roughly $67,500, on a loss that was not even a 30% crash.
The cost of selling at the bottom A $100,000 XEQT position that falls 30% is worth $70,000, and it needs a 43% rebound to return to $100,000. If you sell and the market rebounds 80% from the low, your held portfolio would be worth $126,000 while your cash is still worth roughly $70,000, a gap of about $56,000.
Timing is the second problem, and it is worse than the first. As we covered in our data piece on waiting for the dip, one widely cited analysis of the S&P 500 found that an investor who missed just the ten best days over a 30-year period saw their total return cut roughly in half. Several of those best days arrived in the middle of the worst months, when the news was most alarming and holding cash felt most reasonable. Behavioural research also suggests the average investor trails the funds they own by a couple of percentage points a year, largely because of self-inflicted timing decisions. The market does not announce its bottom. It simply starts going up while you are still scared.
Does Selling Inside a TFSA or RRSP Make It Worse?
Yes, because registered accounts come with room you cannot simply buy back. Selling XEQT and leaving the cash inside your TFSA costs you no room, but you are out of the market. Withdrawing the cash is where the damage happens, because TFSA room is restored only on January 1 of the following year, and only in the amount you took out.
Run the numbers. You contributed $100,000 over the years and the account now holds $70,000. You withdraw all of it. On January 1 you get $70,000 of room back, not $100,000. The $30,000 of room that vanished with the loss is gone permanently. It is a tax-free compounding slot that you can never refill, and with a cumulative TFSA room of $109,000 as of 2026 for someone eligible since 2009, that is a meaningful chunk of your lifetime shelter. On top of that, your money spends the rest of the year outside the account, earning taxable interest at best.
2026 TFSA limit The TFSA annual limit is $7,000 for 2026, and any amount you withdraw is added back to your room on January 1 of the following year, never sooner. The room you lose to market declines before you withdraw does not come back.
The RRSP is harsher. A withdrawal counts as taxable income in the year you take it, tax is withheld at source, and the contribution room you used is not restored. You also cannot claim the loss against anything, because losses inside registered accounts have no tax value. You pay tax on the money you pull out, you give up the shelter permanently, and you have to rebuy at whatever price the market has recovered to. The only upside of selling is the relief of not looking at a red number, which is an expensive feeling.
In a non-registered account, a capital loss can offset capital gains, and there is one defensible reason to sell, which is tax-loss harvesting. Even then, the superficial loss rule denies the loss if you or an affiliated person, including your spouse or your own RRSP or TFSA, buy the same fund within 30 days before or after the sale. That is a tax tool for a specific situation, not a way to escape fear.
The Rebalancing Inside XEQT Isn’t the Hero. Your Next Contribution Is.
It is tempting to say XEQT’s rebalancing is quietly buying cheap stocks for you at a discount while panicking investors sell. That overstates what the fund does. XEQT is a fund of four iShares ETFs, XIC for Canada, XUU for the US, XEF for international developed markets and XEC for emerging markets, targeting roughly 25% Canada, 45% US, 25% international developed and 5% emerging. When one region falls harder than the others, BlackRock trades inside the fund to pull the weights back, and it is invisible to you. We walk through the mechanics in our article on whether you need to rebalance XEQT.
Because XEQT holds no bonds, there is no stable asset to sell and use to buy stocks after a crash, which is how a classic 60/40 portfolio rebalances. The internal trades shift weight between regions, not between safe and risky assets. They are useful housekeeping and they keep the fund true to its mandate, but they are not the force that delivers the recovery.
The recovery comes from the businesses underneath, and from you. Every dollar you contribute during a crash buys more units than the same dollar bought a month ago. At a price near $32.54 instead of $46.48, a $500 monthly contribution buys about 15.4 units instead of 10.8, roughly 43% more for the same cheque. The fund’s internal rebalancing keeps the allocation tidy. Your automatic contribution is what puts the crash to work.
Three Situations, One Answer
If you are a long-term investor with a decade or more before you need the money, a 30% crash is noise. At 35 with a 30-year horizon, you will probably live through several of these. The version of you at 65 will not remember what the account balance was in the worst month. That person will care about how many units you owned when the recovery came.
If you need the money within five years, you are in a harder spot, and I will not pretend otherwise. That money probably should not have been in an all-equity fund. A down payment or tuition bill belongs in a high-interest savings account or short-term GIC. But swapping into XGRO or XBAL would not have saved you in 2022. BlackRock’s reported returns that year were negative 11.00% for XGRO and negative 11.08% for XBAL, compared with negative 10.93% for XEQT, because bonds fell alongside stocks. If a bill is due next month, sell only the amount you must to cover it. That is a funding decision, not a panic trade, and the rest of the portfolio should stay where it is.
If you are retired or close to it, the same rule holds, but construction matters more, because sequence of returns risk is real once you are withdrawing. A cash buffer of one to two years of spending means you never have to sell stocks into a crash, and CPP and OAS form an income floor underneath it. We lay out the buffer approach in our guide to an XEQT withdrawal strategy for retirement. Portfolio construction is the fix, not a panic trade at the bottom.
The common thread is that your situation determines how the portfolio should have been built. It does not change the fact that selling now usually makes things worse. If you built it wrong, fix it with new contributions and calm decisions once prices have recovered, not with a forced sale at the low.
What Should You Actually Do in the Next 48 Hours?
You should stop checking the account. Delete the app from your home screen, turn off price alerts, and if you must look, do it once a week on a fixed day. Nothing you learn by checking at 11pm will change what you should do at 11:05pm. Frequent checking only gives the loss more chances to feel real.
Once the urge to act has settled, confirm that your emergency fund is intact and sitting in cash, not in XEQT. This is the real test of whether this crash is survivable. If you have three to six months of expenses in a savings account, you can ride this out without selling anything. If you do not, the lesson is to build one, but the time to build it is with your next paycheques, not by liquidating your long-term account at a 30% discount.
After that, leave your contributions running. If you have a recurring buy set up through Wealthsimple or Questrade, do nothing at all. That automatic purchase is now buying at a steep discount, and it is the only “action” worth taking. If you have unused TFSA, RRSP or FHSA room and spare cash beyond your emergency fund, adding to the account is reasonable, but never borrow to do it and never invest money you need within five years. Writing down in one sentence why you bought XEQT in the first place can also help, so that the version of you at the bottom has to argue with the version who thought it through.
Why trust these numbers The dollar figures here come from BlackRock’s published calendar-year returns for XEQT and the CRA’s TFSA rules, and I worked through the arithmetic myself. Our annual XEQT review tracks whether the core thesis still holds.
The point of owning XEQT was never to feel good in a crash. It was to own the world’s businesses cheaply and still be there when they recover. You have already paid the hardest part of the price, which is the drop. Do not sell and give away the part that is supposed to pay you back.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I sell XEQT during a market crash? For most long-term investors, no. Selling converts a temporary decline into a permanent loss and forces you to time your re-entry. The exception is money you need within a few years, and only the amount needed for a bill that is actually due.
If I sell XEQT in my TFSA, do I lose contribution room? If you keep the cash inside the TFSA, you lose no room. If you withdraw it, the room is added back on January 1 of the following year, and only for the amount withdrawn, so any market loss before the withdrawal reduces your room permanently.
How long does it take XEQT to recover from a 30% crash? Nobody knows. Past recoveries have taken anywhere from a few months to several years, and stocks tend to recover before the news does. The 2022 low was followed by strong years, with XEQT up 17.05%, 24.67% and 20.45% in 2023 through 2025.
Should I keep buying XEQT while the market is down? Yes, if the money is long-term and your emergency fund is covered. Automatic contributions during a crash buy more units for the same dollars, and the lower the price, the more each cheque buys.