WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · December 9, 2002

A slide before the weapons inspections

-3.89%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Four months of waiting for a war

early in it · 2002-11-27 → 2003-03-11, -14.55% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq fell 3.89% on the day
  • Iraq was about to hand over its weapons declaration. It had become clear that what it contained could decide whether there was a war
  • There was no single event that day; it sat in the middle of the autumn bounce being given back
  • What was sold here was technology, on the calculation that firms would postpone investment if war came
  • They did postpone through that winter, and it showed up as falling orders into the following spring

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.