Nasdaq · June 4, 2010

The jobs number that was almost all census workers

-3.64%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Two months of Greece and a flash crash

midway through · 2010-04-23 → 2010-07-02, -17.33% over the whole period

What happened that day?

4 June 2010 — the Nasdaq fell 3.64%
That morning's US May payrolls showed most of the new jobs were temporary census positions
Strip those out and private hiring had barely grown. It read as a recovery that could not stand on its own
Southern Europe's fiscal problems were spreading at the same time, and that day brought unsettling comments about the budget from Hungary as well
The market was barely a year out of the financial crisis and sensitive to whether the recovery would hold
From the late-April high to the early-July low the index fell 17.33%
The recovery did continue — it just took several more months to confirm

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.