Nasdaq · February 16, 1993
The winter drug stocks broke
-3.64%
single-day change vs previous close
What happened that day?
- On 16 February 1993 the Nasdaq fell 3.64%
- A new US administration had announced it would overhaul health care
- The core of it was government pressure on drug prices — money straight out of pharmaceutical and biotech earnings
- The Nasdaq was full of biotech names that had run hard for several years, so there was plenty to give back
- No single trigger can be pinned to this day. It is a large day inside a months-long slide
- From the peak the index was down 8.88% in this stretch
- The overhaul itself failed the following year
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.