S&P 500 · August 18, 2020
The COVID rebound
+51.51%
trough back to the old high
103 trading days · 2020-03-23 → 2020-08-18
this undid the slide that began 2020-02-19
What happened that day?
- From the 23 March 2020 low to 18 August the S&P 500 rose 51.51% — 103 trading days
- It undid the COVID crash — a third of the index gone in 23 trading days from 19 February
- The low was made by the Fed's promise of unlimited bond buying. Once it said it would buy corporate debt too, the fear of companies going under dropped sharply
- Congress passed a large relief package with direct payments and expanded unemployment benefits
- The economy was still bad but stocks rose. Businesses that lockdowns actually helped were the ones pulling the index up
- Remote work, online shopping and video calls loomed large in the index, so it stopped tracking the real economy
- The February high was back on 18 August
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.