Nasdaq · March 12, 2020

The day after the WHO called it a pandemic

-9.43%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The COVID crash on the Nasdaq

midway through · 2020-02-19 → 2020-03-23, -30.12% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The Nasdaq fell 9.43% on the day, the largest single-day drop of the covid crash
The day before, the WHO had declared covid a pandemic. The same day the US announced restrictions on arrivals from Europe
As losses deepened during the session, US trading was halted — the second time that week
What frightened the market here was not the disease but the impossibility of calculating. Not knowing how long lockdowns would run means not knowing what companies would lose
It was a phase where not the price but the trade itself failed to form. There were only sellers
The bottom came eight sessions later on 23 March, made by the Fed's announcement of unlimited buying

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.