Nasdaq · November 30, 1987
A month after the crash, the dollar slips
-3.57%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Nasdaq's road back from Black Monday
early in it · 1987-10-28 → 1989-08-03, +56.53% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 30 November 1987 — the Nasdaq fell 3.57% to close at 305.20. No single cause can be pinned to the day
- Six weeks earlier, on 19 October, American stocks had fallen further in one session than ever before. The aftershocks were still running
- The worry of the moment was the dollar. Cutting the trade deficit was said to require a lower dollar, and lower is what it kept doing
- A falling dollar costs foreign holders of American assets on the exchange rate alone. That gives them a reason to sell, and selling takes the price down again
- The Nasdaq is full of small companies, and trading in them had thinned after October. The same sell order moved the price further
- The episode recorded here ran 35.96% from the late-August high to the 28 October low
- Recovery took years. This index was a long time getting back to its 1987 high
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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.