Meet the 1 Stock I'd Buy With $500, Even If the Market Fell 5% Tomorrow

Buying a stock and watching it drop 5% the next day, or watching the broader market drop the next day, is a grim way to start an investment. Last week made this situation and question less hypothetical. On Thursday of last week, the S&P 500 fell 4.4%, its worst day since April 2025. The Nasdaq Composite dropped more than 5% into correction territory, and AI stocks lost more than $820 billion of market value in a few sessions. Anyone who put money to work on Wednesday afternoon woke up Friday feeling foolish.

They should not. The framing in my headline matters because the alternative, waiting for the right moment, has a worse record than almost any strategy an investor can name.

Image source: Getty Images.

Why the day you buy matters less than you think

The uncomfortable math of market timing is that it requires being right twice: once on the way out and once on the way back in. Most people who sold on Thursday will not buy back in time to catch the rebound, because rebounds do not send invitations. Friday's bounce arrived while the headlines were still describing the crash. The market is up even more this week -- currently up 2% on Monday, Nov. 9 -- which further shows that you can't time the market.

What works instead is simpler and less satisfying. Buy a business whose earnings will be higher in five years than they are today, and let the earnings do the work. A 5% drop the day after you buy is a rounding error for a company that compounds profits at 10% a year for a decade. The money is made by the business, not by the entry point. That only holds if the business is the right kind, which is why the stock below is the one I would pick.

O'Reilly Automotive sells one thing nobody can postpone

O'Reilly Automotive (NASDAQ: ORLY) sells car parts to mechanics and do-it-yourselfers at more than 6,000 stores, and its business gets better when the economy gets worse. When people cannot afford a new car, they fix the old one. When they cannot afford a mechanic, they buy the alternator and watch a video. A dead battery does not care what the Nasdaq did this week.

The numbers from October show a company in no need of a recovery. Third-quarter comparable store sales rose 7.2% on top of a 5.6% gain a year earlier. Sales grew 9% to $5.1 billion, and O'Reilly raised its full-year comparable sales outlook to 5.5% to 6.5%. The company has opened 173 net new stores so far this year and is on pace for 225 to 235, pushing further into Mexico and Canada. It also repurchased $1.03 billion of stock in the quarter alone, which it has been doing for so long that the share count has fallen by more than half over the past 15 years.

That buyback habit is the quiet engine. Even in a year when sales grow only modestly, each remaining share owns a larger slice of the company, which is why earnings per share have compounded faster than the business itself for decades.

What $500 gets you

At about $90 a share, $500 buys five shares of O'Reilly. That is not a position that will change a life, but it is a position in a company that has grown comparable sales for 33 consecutive years up to 2025, through 2008, through 2020, and through whatever this week turns out to have been. The stock is not cheap, and auto parts retailers do face a slow-moving question about electric vehicles, which need fewer replacement parts. For now, the average car on American roads is over 12 years old and getting older, which is the opposite of a problem for O'Reilly.

To me, the right move with $500 this week is not to wait for the market to tell you it is safe. It is to buy five shares of a business that sells things people cannot put off, turn off the news, and check back when the car needs a new battery.

Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.