Nasdaq · March 9, 2009
A halving that took seventeen months
-55.63%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
339 trading days · 2007-10-31 → 2009-03-09
still below that peak today
What happened that day?
- From the high on 31 October 2007 to the low on 9 March 2009, the Nasdaq fell 55.63% over 339 trading days
- It was the Nasdaq's second halving since the dot-com collapse, but this time the fault was in the financial system, not in technology
- Loans written on the assumption that house prices only rise had been sliced up and sold worldwide. When prices fell, nobody knew who was holding what
- Banks stopped trusting each other, so money stopped circulating, and sound companies could not raise funds either
- The steepest stretch came after a large investment bank failed in September 2008. Most of the decline is packed into the final six months
- 9 March 2009 was the bottom. From that day US shares rose for more than a decade
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.