S&P 500 · March 10, 2009

The day a decade-long bull market began

+6.37%

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?

The S&P 500 rose 6.37% on the day. The previous session, 9 March, was the bottom of the entire crisis
That morning a large US bank said it had been profitable through the first two months of the year
The market then saw outright nationalisation of the banks as possible. Saying it was profitable erased that worst case
The number itself was not large. What mattered was confirmation that banks could still earn
From the October 2007 high to this bottom the index had lost more than half its value
The advance that started here ran eleven years, to the covid crash of 2020 — the longest bull market in US history

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.