Nasdaq · October 9, 2002
The dot-com bust
-77.93%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
647 trading days · 2000-03-10 → 2002-10-09
back to the old high on 2015-04-23
What happened that day?
- From the March 2000 peak to the October 2002 low the Nasdaq fell 77.93% — 647 trading days
- In the late 1990s, adding dot-com to a company name was enough to move the stock. Firms with no profit and often no revenue listed and multiplied
- Companies were valued on how many users they gathered, not how they made money. Figuring out the money part was left for later
- The Fed raised rates through 1999 and 2000. Free money dried up, and loss-making firms had nothing left to burn
- One after another the dot-coms ran out of cash and shut down. The survivors were the few with a real business
- The Nasdaq did not pass its March 2000 high again until April 2015 — 15 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.