Nasdaq · April 20, 2009
The day the bank profits stopped being believed
-3.88%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Thirteen months that doubled off the bottom
early in it · 2009-03-09 → 2010-04-23, +99.44% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 20 April 2009 — the Nasdaq fell 3.88%. No single cause for that one day could be pinned down
- Banks were reporting profits one after another. The question was where those profits came from
- An accounting change meant they no longer had to mark their holdings to market, and that fed through into earnings
- Whether loan-loss provisions were big enough was the other argument. What you assume you will not collect decides what you report
- It also came after more than a month of gains off the 9 March bottom, so there was plenty to give back
- The episode fell 3.88% — from 17 April to this day, a single session was all of it
- The index kept climbing after this, running up through the rest of the year
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.