WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · September 29, 2015

The bottom of the China shock

-4.05%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

A two-month retrace

early in it · 2015-09-29 → 2015-12-01, +18.20% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nikkei 225 fell 4.05% on the day — the bottom of this decline
  • Chinese shares had broken that summer and the yuan had been devalued, dragging Asian markets down together
  • China matters to Japan two ways: it is a large market for Japanese goods, and Chinese visitors were a pillar of Japanese spending
  • Commodity prices collapsed at the same time, pushing resource companies and trading houses down hard
  • Expectations that the Bank of Japan would ease further ran through this period, and disappointment followed when it did nothing at its October meeting
  • The rebound began from this day and ran to December

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.