WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · March 16, 2022

The first hike in four years

+3.77%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The 2021–22 tech bear market

early in it · 2021-11-19 → 2022-12-28, -36.40% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 16 March 2022 the Nasdaq rose 3.77%
  • The Fed raised rates that day — its first since 2018, and the first step away from the near-zero rate of the pandemic
  • Rising stocks on a rate rise looks odd. But what the market feared was not the hike itself; it was when and how much
  • Three months of pricing it in ended when it actually happened, and the uncertainty went with it
  • The number of further hikes officials pencilled in for the year was also within what had been expected
  • The relief did not last. The Fed raised six more times that year
  • In this stretch the index was 33.7% 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.