WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · April 14, 2000

The Dot-com Crash — S&P 500

-5.83%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The dot-com bust hits the S&P 500

early in it · 2000-03-24 → 2002-10-09, -49.15% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 14 April 2000 — S&P 500 fell 5.83%, a little over half the Nasdaq's decline
  • That gap matters. The S&P 500 holds manufacturers, banks and consumer companies alongside tech
  • Internet valuations could break without changing what the rest of the index earned
  • Stopped at 11.19% from peak (sharp contrast with the Nasdaq over the same period)
  • Shows the problem was in the price of one sector, not the market as a whole
  • The S&P 500 would fall substantially too over the following years. It just took time for the tech bust to spread into the wider economy

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.