S&P 500 · January 2, 2003

The first session after three losing years

+3.32%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The 2002–07 recovery

early in it · 2002-10-09 → 2007-05-30, +97.00% over the whole period

What happened that day?

2 January 2003 — the S&P 500 rose 3.32%. No single cause for that one day could be pinned down
It was the first session after three consecutive losing years
A new year brings freshly allocated money. Gains bunching into the first session are not unusual
US manufacturing data released that day came in above the dividing line — read as a turn in the cycle
The decline was not over, though. With the Iraq war ahead, the index kept falling into mid-March
From the November 2002 high to the March 2003 low the index fell 14.71%
The real bottom was in March, and a rally of nearly five years started there

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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.