S&P 500 · December 4, 2018

The day the bond market flipped its order

-3.24%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Q4 2018 selloff

near the end of it · 2018-09-20 → 2018-12-24, -19.78% over the whole period

What happened that day?

4 December 2018 — the S&P 500 fell 3.24%
The day before, the three-year Treasury yield rose above the five-year for the first time since the financial crisis
Lending for longer normally pays more. When the order flips, it means the market expects worse ahead
That inversion has long been read as an early recession signal. It has been right often enough that the signal itself brings selling
Hopes for a US-China trade deal cooled the same day, giving back the gains from the summit two days earlier
US markets were closed the next day for a day of mourning, so the decline was concentrated into the sessions that traded
From the late-September high to the 24 December low the index fell 19.78%

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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.