S&P 500 · April 20, 2009
Doubting the profits
-4.28%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Eighty percent in a year off the bottom
early in it · 2009-03-09 → 2010-04-23, +79.93% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 20 April 2009 the S&P 500 fell 4.28%
- Banks were reporting profits, but questions arose about where those profits came from
- The accounting change that let them stop marking assets to market was flowing into the numbers
- Whether loan loss provisions were adequate was also disputed. How much future bad debt you assume changes the profit
- The market alternated between good news and doubting it, on a scale of days
- No single trigger can be pinned to this day
- In this stretch the index was 27.62% below its peak
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.