WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · July 15, 2009

The summer earnings beat

+2.96%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Eighty percent in a year off the bottom

early in it · 2009-03-09 → 2010-04-23, +79.93% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 15 July 2009 the S&P 500 rose 2.96%
  • A large chipmaker reported the evening before and a large bank that morning, both well above forecast
  • For the first time since the crisis, earnings were supporting prices. Until then it had been policy hopes
  • But the profits came more from cutting costs than growing sales — profit made by cutting staff
  • So prices rose while employment did not. This recovery was called a jobless one
  • In this stretch the index was 7.09% below its peak

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.