S&P 500 · July 17, 1980
Six years back from the oil shock
+94.99%
trough back to the old high
1,462 trading days · 1974-10-03 → 1980-07-17
this undid the slide that began 1973-01-11
What happened that day?
- From the 3 October 1974 low to 17 July 1980 the S&P 500 rose 94.99% — 1,462 trading days
- It undid a decline that had taken nearly half the index
- Six years was slow because the inflation problem never went away — every rally stalled whenever the price data came in bad
- A second oil shock in 1979 sent crude up again and delayed the recovery once more
- And with inflation that high, getting the index back was not the same as getting the money back in real purchasing power
- The old high returned on 17 July 1980 — four months before the Volcker high-rate bear market began
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.