S&P 500 · August 5, 2002

The summer the books could not be trusted

-3.43%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The dot-com bust hits the S&P 500

near the end of it · 2000-03-24 → 2002-10-09, -49.15% over the whole period

What happened that day?

5 August 2002 — the S&P 500 fell 3.43%. No single cause for that one day could be pinned down
That year's problem was not earnings but the reporting of earnings. One large company after another was found to have dressed its books
Pricing a stock means trusting a profit figure. That premise cracked, so everything fell together regardless of sector
The market had already broken down in late July and bounced. Early August was a retest of that low
Around this time executives were required to sign off on their own financial statements personally. Rebuilding trust took time
From the April high to the October low the index fell 31.29% — the final leg of the dot-com unwind

Sources

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.