WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · December 25, 2018

The Christmas Selloff

-5.01%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The fourth-quarter selloff

near the end of it · 2018-10-02 → 2018-12-25, -21.07% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 25 December 2018 — Nikkei 225 fell 5.01%. US markets were closed for Christmas; Tokyo was open
  • Several problems had converged in the US by year-end
  • The Fed was still raising rates, the federal government had entered a shutdown over budget disputes, and the US–China trade conflict was running
  • Year-end trading is thin. With fewer participants, the same volume of sell orders moves prices further
  • Part of this decline was that technical effect
  • Fell 21.07% from peak. Once the new year began and the Fed signalled it would slow its pace, markets recovered quickly

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.