Nasdaq · January 10, 2000
The day an internet company bought a media giant
+4.30%
single-day change vs previous close
What happened that day?
- On 10 January 2000 the Nasdaq rose 4.3%
- That morning an internet access company announced it was buying a large media group
- It was the biggest deal on record at the time, and it was paid for not in cash but in the buyer's own shares
- That is the whole point of it: a company whose price had inflated enormously was using that price to buy real assets
- The market cheered, reading it as proof that internet valuations were real
- It went the other way. The merger is now a standard example of the worst deals ever done
- The peak of the dot-com era came two months after this announcement. In this stretch the index was 19.6% below its high
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 written from the sources listed above.