WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · December 4, 1990

A year-end wobble

-3.80%

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 4 December 1990 the Nikkei 225 fell 3.8%
  • It had risen for two months off the October low, and selling to lock that in arrived
  • The end of the Gulf crisis was also not yet in sight. The deadline for war was the following January
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 29.29% below its peak
  • The rebound itself carried on to March

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.