WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · December 10, 1984

After the personal computer bubble deflated

+4.55%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

After the shakeout

early in it · 1984-07-25 → 1986-01-07, +46.34% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq rose 4.55% on the day
  • It followed the collapse in 1984 of personal computer shares that had run up hard through 1983
  • Computers were not failing to sell. Too many companies had piled in and prices broke, with a price war in the home computer market
  • Several firms closed or were sold in this period. What survived had either scale or a hold on the business market
  • It showed that a technology can genuinely take hold while only a few companies make money from it
  • The shape repeats — the internet in the 1990s, solar in the 2010s, electric cars in the 2020s all followed it

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.