WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · November 8, 2000

A contested election and warnings

-5.39%

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?

  • On 8 November 2000 the Nasdaq fell 5.39% in a single day
  • The US presidential election held the day before had no confirmed result. The recount dispute ran for over a month
  • Not knowing who would be president means not knowing tax or regulatory policy, which makes corporate planning hard
  • Tech profit warnings kept arriving over the same stretch and deepened the fall
  • Eight months into the dot-com bust, the market reacted more sharply to any bad news
  • The index kept falling for two 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.