S&P 500 · November 30, 1987
One more, a month after the crash
-4.18%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Black Monday slide
near the end of it · 1987-08-25 → 1987-12-04, -33.51% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The S&P 500 fell 4.18% to close at 230.30. No single trigger for the day could be pinned down
- Six weeks earlier, on 19 October, this index had posted its largest single-day fall on record — still unbroken
- The market did not settle afterwards. From the August high to the early-December low the fall was 33.51%
- The worry of this stretch was the dollar. Cutting the American trade deficit was said to require a weaker dollar, and the dollar kept sliding
- A falling dollar means losses for foreign money holding American assets. That creates a reason to sell
- The bottom of the episode came four days later, on 4 December, and the recovery ran from there
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.