WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · December 7, 1990

Retraced in three days

+4.30%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The first bounce

midway through · 1990-10-01 → 1991-03-18, +34.25% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 7 December 1990 the Nikkei 225 rose 4.3%
  • It undid the fall from three days earlier
  • The market could not pick a direction and swung hard on a scale of days
  • This whipsaw appears when there is little to price against — which is the state right after a bubble deflates
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 28.07% 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.