S&P 500 · May 6, 2010
The price that vanished and came back
-3.24%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Europe's crisis and the flash crash
early in it · 2010-04-23 → 2010-07-02, -15.99% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 6 May 2010 the S&P 500 closed down 3.24%, having fallen far more intraday and come back
- In the afternoon the Dow fell nearly a thousand points within minutes and recovered most of it in twenty
- It is known as the flash crash. Automated programs reacted to each other's selling and prices simply vanished
- Some stocks traded at a cent and some at a hundred thousand dollars. The pricing machinery briefly stopped working
- The background was a market already unsettled by Greece. The trigger was pulled in a market that had gone thin
- Single-stock trading halts were introduced afterwards
- In this stretch the index was 15.99% 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.