Nasdaq · October 29, 2001

The day the books came under suspicion

-3.93%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The three and a half months after the attacks

midway through · 2001-09-21 → 2002-01-04, +44.70% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The Nasdaq fell 3.93% on the day
It emerged that an accounting inquiry had opened into a large US energy company, and its credit rating was cut
The firm was among the largest in the country at the time and had been praised for years as a new kind of company
The problem was that losses had been moved into entities kept off the books. Profits had been greatly inflated
The suspicion that started here spread to a telecom the following year and ended in a state where no company's numbers were trusted
The company went bankrupt two months later, taking its auditor down with it

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.