WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · December 5, 2000

The rate-cut hope surge

+10.48%

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 5 December 2000 the Nasdaq rose 10.48% in a single day
  • The dot-com bust was nine months old and the index was far below its peak
  • The Fed chair acknowledged the slowdown in a speech, and hope of an imminent rate cut took hold
  • Tech companies growing while losing money react hardest to that, because lower rates make funding easier
  • This was a move on expectation alone. The actual cut came the following January
  • Even after the cut the decline did not stop. The Nasdaq kept falling until October 2002

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.