WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · January 20, 2016

The winter oil broke thirty

-3.71%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

When negative rates backfired

near the end of it · 2015-12-01 → 2016-02-12, -25.28% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 20 January 2016 the Nikkei 225 fell 3.71%
  • Oil had dropped below thirty dollars a barrel, its lowest in twelve years
  • Cheaper oil should be good news for an importing country. This time it was read the other way
  • Falling that fast was taken as a signal that world demand was collapsing
  • Worries about oil-producing states' finances and energy company debt surfaced alongside it
  • China fears piled on, and markets everywhere fell together
  • In this stretch the index was 25.28% below its peak

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.