Nasdaq · September 6, 2002

The Friday the jobs number read better

+3.54%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Nine months when the books could not be trusted

near the end of it · 2002-01-04 → 2002-10-09, -45.90% over the whole period

What happened that day?

6 September 2002 — the Nasdaq rose 3.54% to close at 1,295.30. No single cause can be pinned to the day
It was the morning of the monthly employment report, which the United States publishes on the first Friday of each month
The same index had fallen by a similar amount the day before. This took it back in one session
The worry in 2002 was whether the economy would sink again. A labour market that holds pushes that worry out
But the bounces of this period were consistently short. Accounting fraud and corporate default kept coming back
The low of this episode came a month later, on 9 October — the bottom of the whole bear market
From the mid-May high to the 9 October low the index fell 36.02%

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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.