Nasdaq · April 3, 2000
April 2000 — the bust begins
-7.64%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The eleven weeks when the bubble first broke
early in it · 2000-03-10 → 2000-05-23, -37.32% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 3 April 2000 the Nasdaq fell 7.64% in a single day
- A US court ruled that day that a large software company had violated antitrust law
- It read as a signal that the whole tech industry could face regulation, and selling piled in
- The Nasdaq had already been wobbling since mid-March, with talk that loss-making companies were priced absurdly
- A company that grows while losing money is priced on the belief that profits come later. Shake the belief and the basis disappears
- This is where the dot-com bust starts. The Nasdaq kept falling for two and a half more years
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.