Nikkei 225 · February 27, 1995

The day Nikkei futures took down a bank

-3.80%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Kobe quake and a record yen

near the end of it · 1994-06-13 → 1995-07-03, -32.79% over the whole period

What happened that day?

On 27 February 1995 the Nikkei 225 fell 3.8%
Over the previous weekend a 233-year-old British bank had gone bankrupt. The cause was Nikkei futures
An employee at its Singapore office had bet an enormous sum on the index rising, without the firm's knowledge
When the January earthquake broke the index, the position became a loss larger than the bank's own capital
The bank was sold for one pound. It remains the standard example of one unsupervised person erasing a whole firm
The episode then fed more Nikkei futures selling, pressing the index down again
In this stretch the index was 26.96% 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.