Nasdaq · March 14, 2000
The first crack, four days off the top
-4.09%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The eleven weeks when the bubble first broke
early in it · 2000-03-10 → 2000-05-23, -37.32% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nasdaq fell 4.09% on the day
- It was four days after the record high of 10 March. This was the last week the index stood above five thousand
- The US and British governments issued a joint statement saying human genome data should be freely available to all
- Biotechnology shares collapsed in a single session on the news, because it undercut the premise of companies planning to profit from that data
- Biotech was, after the internet, the most richly priced part of the Nasdaq at the time
- A crack starting in one sector and spreading to others is a pattern that repeated for the next two and a half years
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.