S&P 500 · April 6, 2020
The day the curve looked like bending
+7.03%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The COVID rebound
early in it · 2020-03-23 → 2020-08-18, +51.51% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The S&P 500 rose 7.03% on the day, its largest single-day gain since the 23 March bottom
- Over the weekend, figures from Italy, Spain and New York showed the growth in new cases slowing
- What the market watched here was not the number of cases but the rate of increase. Once the rate bends, you can start calculating when lockdowns end
- And once you can estimate the lockdown, you can estimate how long companies must survive. Until then no calculation was possible at all
- The Fed had already promised unlimited buying and taken default risk off the table, so the remaining variable was the lockdown
- Four and a half months after this day, the index had regained its February high
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.