WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · April 14, 2000

The Dot-com Crash

-9.67%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The eleven weeks when the bubble first broke

midway through · 2000-03-10 → 2000-05-23, -37.32% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • Friday 14 April 2000 — Nasdaq Composite fell 9.67%, closing a week of steady decline
  • No single trigger: hot inflation data raising rate fears, Microsoft's antitrust case running
  • Above all, unprofitable internet companies were starting to run out of cash
  • The bubble's logic: losses today are fine if you capture the market and earn later
  • Once funding dried up, companies began failing to reach 'later' — and the whole logic collapsed
  • Fell 37.32% from peak. Only the beginning; the eventual decline went far deeper

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.