Every drawdown produces the same question, phrased the same way: should I pause until things settle? It is a reasonable instinct and an expensive one.
What a pause actually costs
A SIP buys more units when prices fall. Pausing removes precisely the instalments that would have been bought cheapest, and they are rarely replaced later.
“The instalments you skip in a bad year are the ones you would most want back in a good one.”
When pausing is reasonable
Market level is not on that list. If the only thing that changed is the price, the SIP is doing its job.