S&P 500 · May 25, 1970

The day before the bottom

-2.77%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The 1970 credit crunch

near the end of it · 1970-01-05 → 1970-05-26, -25.86% over the whole period

What happened that day?

May 25, 1970 — the S&P 500 fell 2.77% to 70.25. No single cause for the day could be pinned down
That spring was bad inside and out: the war had spread to a neighbouring country, and students had been killed on a campus
Inside the market, a large railroad's cash position was the talk — the fear was the commercial paper market freezing
It was the biggest one-day fall of the year
The low came the very next session, May 26. Then May 27 bounced by far more than this day had lost
From March 3 to May 26 the episode ran -23.21%
That bounce did not end the decline. Regaining the old high took years

Sources

S&P 500

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.