I don’t care if the stock market crashes in 2026. I’m still buying bargain shares today

With brewing geopolitical tensions, trade disruptions, and rising energy costs, some investors are growing increasingly nervous about a potential stock market crash. However, while there’s some cause for concern, history has shown that trying to time the market is a dangerous endeavour, often leaving enormous sums of money on the table.

That’s why I’ve continued my hunt for bargain shares in 2026 even with the wider macroeconomic landscape looking shaky. And one stock I’ve been buying this year is Toast (NYSE:TOST).

Why I’m still buying despite the uncertainty

As a quick introduction, Toast provides a complete ecosystem of software and hardware solutions that allow restaurateurs to run their business seamlessly.

Rather than just selling point-of-sale (POS) hardware, it earns most of its money through recurring subscription fees and a cut of the payment volume flowing through its platform. That recurring, high-margin revenue model is exactly what makes the business so compelling.

August’s second-quarter results showed genuinely impressive momentum. Total revenue climbed 23% year-on-year to $1.9bn, while net income almost doubled to $154m from $80m a year earlier, backed by expanding operating margins reaching 26%.

But the crowning achievement was adding a record 9,500 new locations to its roster, bringing the total to 180,000. And crucially, this growth isn’t coming at the expense of profitability. In fact, on almost every metric, Toast’s per-location performance shows a steady and consistent trend of extracting more value from every customer it signs.

What’s more, when digging deeper into the numbers, even more growth could be on the horizon.

An incoming surge?

Despite delivering double-digit growth across the board, one important metric did lag, and that was net cash generation, which actually fell 8.6%, from $302m to $276m. That’s a little strange given the outperformance of revenue and earnings, so what happened?

The answer lies in inventories. With the global supply of memory chips getting tighter, management has begun proactively building a larger stock of hardware to continue onboarding new customers at a rapid pace.

That sets the stage for potentially more impressive growth on the horizon if the per-location metrics continue to improve. However, it’s important to highlight that Toast’s business is directly tied to how much money flows through restaurant tills. And as such, it makes it inherently sensitive to the broader economy.

So far, demand for dining out has proven to be quite resilient. But if the economic environment stumbles into a wider recession, households could start cutting back, causing transaction volumes and payment revenue to slow sharply.

Worth buying through the noise?

Toast’s combination of accelerating profitability, expanding margins per location, and a rapidly growing customer base is why I’ve continued to steadily add shares to my growth portfolio.

To be clear, the macroeconomic uncertainty is real. But given the underlying quality of this business and the not-so-demanding valuation compared to other price points in the stock market, it’s a risk I’m comfortable taking.

And it’s not the only growth stock that I’ve been busy buying lately…

Should you invest £5,000 in Toast right now?

When investing expert Mark Rogers and his team have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the flagship Twelfth Magpie Share Advisor newsletter he has run for nearly a decade has provided thousands of paying members with top stock recommendations from the UK and US markets.

And right now, Mark thinks there are 6 standout stocks that investors should consider buying. Want to see if Toast made the list?

Zaven Boyrazian owns shares in Toast.