If the stock market crashes, I will buy this rising FTSE 100 stock immediately

Historically, there have been major stock market crashes in September and October. Although there is no definite pattern, these months have seen a few decent market crashes.

Here are a few notable examples:

• October 1929: the crash of 1929, often considered the start of the Great Depression
• October 1987: this month saw the biggest single-day drop in history
• September 2008: the collapse of US bank Lehman Brothers triggered the Global Financial Crisis

Some market analysts are currently warning of a bubble in artificial intelligence (AI) stocks due to their rapid expansion. They suggest that this bubble may pop, which could cause a significant drop in stock prices.

While this is possible, it is not certain that a market crash is imminent. In times of uncertainty, some investors turn to charts and data for concrete answers.

However, the key takeaway, in my opinion, is that the stock market has been recovering from past crashes. In addition, some investors who bucked the crowd during these downturns, buying stocks when others were selling out of fear, ended up making huge profits.

If the stock market were to crash this year, I would immediately start collecting shares of this UK company.

A world class company

Despite not being a household name, RELX (LSE: REL) is one of Britain's great success stories. It serves clients in more than 180 countries, including many Fortune 500 companies.

I FTSE 100 the stock is up more than 700% over the past 15 years. Over five years, it has doubled, crushing the average Footsie return in the process.

The company is a leader in providing data and analytics services. Its high-quality, reliable information is valuable to clients in fields such as law, health care, and finance.

Its LexisNexis database, for example, is widely used by lawyers, judges, and academics to conduct in-depth legal research. It hosts more than 138bn legal and news records, and more than 2.2m new documents are added daily from more than 50,000 sources.

Clients subscribe to these services, making the firm's revenue more visible. It's a powerful business model that has seen revenues rise from £7.1bn in 2020 to a forecast of £9.6bn this year.

An expensive stock

Obviously, a quality business with competitive advantages like this deserves a trade-in for a premium price check. It has attractive profit margins.

However, the forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is 30. In context, that's the same multiplier as the 'Magnificent 7' group of AI stocks: an apple, Microsoft, Alphabets, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta Platformsagain Tesla.

A market crash could take any froth out of RELX's valuation, making it even more attractive to me.

Thriving in the age of AI

The company has been working on AI for years, but recently created a series of interesting productivity AI tools from its large database of proprietary information.

Lexis+ AI is one example. This legal AI tool can go from a blank page to arguments, contract clauses, and shorten client interactions in seconds. The time and money saved for customers should be huge.

The bottom line is, Lexis+ AI delivers 100% connected legal citations that are visually impaired thanks to the high-quality data it's trained on.

Naturally, business can face increasing competitive threats, especially in the disruptive age of AI. But as things stand, it is at the top of my list of stocks to buy if the market crashes.