WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · January 13, 2016

The year that began at its worst

-3.41%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

China's slowdown and the oil crash

near the end of it · 2015-07-20 → 2016-02-11, -18.24% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq fell 3.41% on the day
  • The first two weeks of 2016 were the worst start to a year in US market history
  • A circuit breaker China had just introduced made its crash worse: everyone rushed to sell before it triggered, steepening the fall. It was scrapped after four days
  • Oil fell below thirty dollars a barrel at the same time, after producers failed to agree on cutting output
  • Cheaper oil is normally good for consumers, but here the default risk at energy companies and the withdrawal of oil-state money weighed more
  • The decline ran to 11 February, and the recovery from that bottom lasted into 2018

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.