WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · May 7, 2010

The day after New York fell apart in minutes

-3.10%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Europe's crisis and a soaring yen

early in it · 2010-04-05 → 2010-08-31, -22.18% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nikkei fell 3.1% on the day
  • The previous session in New York had collapsed within minutes and then recovered most of it. It was later traced to automated orders pushing each other
  • The prices came back but the confidence did not, because it had been shown that the structure of the market itself could seize up
  • Behind it sat Greece's fiscal crisis — that week Greek bond yields were spiking and protests were running
  • Japan had the strong yen on top: through this whole period, uncertainty meant buying yen
  • This decline ran to the end of August

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.