Nasdaq · July 25, 1984
The early PC shakeout
-31.50%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
274 trading days · 1983-06-24 → 1984-07-25
back to the old high on 1986-01-07
What happened that day?
- From the June 1983 peak to the July 1984 low the Nasdaq fell 31.5% — 274 trading days
- 1983 was the year personal computers first went mainstream. Related shares surged and new listings poured out
- The problem was that there were too many companies. Firms making near-identical products piled in and prices collapsed
- The home game and computer market in particular broke on oversupply, leaving unsold inventory everywhere
- The process of clearing out companies that could not make a profit, leaving a few survivors, ran for over a year
- The old high returned on 7 January 1986
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.