S&P 500 · March 18, 2020
The fourth circuit breaker
-5.18%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The COVID crash
near the end of it · 2020-02-19 → 2020-03-23, -33.92% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 18 March 2020 the S&P 500 fell 5.18% in a single day
- Circuit breakers tripped four times that month. The mechanism halts trading on a sharp fall and had barely been used since 1987
- Countries were closing borders and shops, and economic activity was genuinely stopping
- Gold and Treasuries were being sold alongside stocks — investors who needed cash sold whatever they could
- Safe assets being sold too is the signal that cash itself is running short in the market
- The low came five days later on 23 March, made by the Fed's unlimited buying announcement
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.