WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · January 2, 2001

A New Year That Started at −7%

-7.23%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Nine months down without a rest

midway through · 2000-07-17 → 2001-04-04, -61.66% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 2 January 2001 — first session of the year, Nasdaq Composite fell 7.23%
  • The next day the Fed cut rates outside a scheduled meeting, judging the slowdown was faster than expected
  • Markets rallied hard for a day, but the direction didn't change
  • Lesson of this period: a rate cut is not the same as a rising market
  • That a central bank is moving in a hurry is itself information that conditions are bad (the same scene repeated in March 2020)
  • Fell 61.3% from peak. By now the Nasdaq was worth less than half what it had been a year earlier

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.