Europe's ETF savings-plan generation has never faced a sustained bear market at current scale

Europe's retail ETF savings-plan machine has multiplied roughly sixfold since 2020 and ran at a record 15.1 million monthly plan executions across the continent in 2025. What it has not done at anything like that size is sit through a prolonged bear market — an untested stretch between the evidence for recurring-flow investing and the scale it has now reached.

The closest thing to a stress test came on April 2, 2025, when the US president's tariff announcement, quickly dubbed "Liberation Day," sent global equities sharply lower, though major US and European indices had recouped their losses within a month — a correction, and a short one. The two genuine bear markets of recent years frame what could come next: the pandemic crash of 2020 lasted all of 33 days, while the inflation-driven drawdown of 2022 ran for 282, one over almost before a monthly plan could have been paused and the other grinding on for most of a year.

Scalable Capital, whose European Investor Exchange we covered in September when it extended its trading day to 17 hours, offers the cleanest read on what plan holders actually did in the 2025 selloff: its clients bought more. According to the company's chief economist, Christian W. Röhl, they neither sold nor paused their plans and instead "viewed the lower valuations as a buying opportunity," with the caveat that matters for everyone else: "Understanding that reality in theory is one thing," he said, "but holding fast through a sustained drawdown is the true test of investor discipline."

The composition of that book explains some of the calm. Roughly 70 percent of Scalable's clients hold at least one ETF, ETFs account for about 70 percent of total client assets, more than 80 percent of that ETF money sits in broadly diversified equity indices, and 90 percent of the firm's ETF investors hold at least one world ETF — a portfolio built to be added to when prices fall, because almost none of it rests on a view that falling prices contradict.

There is also a mechanical reason the April behaviour looked disciplined: a standing monthly order does not require conviction, only inertia, buying on a schedule regardless of the headline. That is the design's argument for surviving drawdowns, and it is why any real test has to run longer than the time it takes a saver to lose interest in checking. A 33-day crash never poses the question that a 282-day one does. It is the difference between pressing through a bad week and deciding, month after month, to keep sending money into a falling market.

The dip-buying is encouraging, and smaller than the growth of the machine that would have to repeat it. extraETF's European Savings Plan Study puts the 2025 record at 15.1 million monthly savings-plan executions in continental Europe, up about 129 percent from 2022 and roughly sixfold since 2020, with the path running through 2.5 million in 2020, 6.6 million in 2022 and 10.8 million in 2024. The 2022 figure is less than half the 2025 total, meaning a clear majority of today's monthly savings activity has been added to the system since the last prolonged drawdown ended, and even that 2022 drawdown — the longer of the two recent bear markets — fell on a cohort under half today's size. Projections put the total north of 50 million by 2030, which would make the next serious drawdown a test of a book several times larger again. European savings-plan growth is, as this publication has argued, an app story before it is a product story — and it is the app that would have to hold.

The backdrop for the next test is not obviously kinder than 2022's: global public debt reached nearly 94 percent of GDP in 2025 and, on IMF projections, is on course to hit 100 percent by 2029. The fund has warned that structural shifts in sovereign debt markets "are amplifying vulnerability to repricing" and called for urgent global action, while the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury has recently moved above 5 percent. Whether those threads produce a drawdown long enough to matter is unknowable; they are the raw material of one.

What has changed since 2022 is the size of the savings-plan book and how little attention it demands: the monthly instruction will keep buying through the first weeks of a selloff by design, and keep buying late into one, and the case that it holds rests on one firm's reading of a four-week shock. The next genuine test will arrive with a book more than twice the size of the one that lived through 2022, and with most of today's plan holders never having sat through a 282-day drawdown at all.