WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · January 30, 1995

Two weeks after the quake

+3.58%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Kobe quake and a record yen

midway through · 1994-06-13 → 1995-07-03, -32.79% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 30 January 1995 the Nikkei 225 rose 3.58%
  • It was two weeks after the Kobe earthquake of 17 January, and the index had dropped hard in between
  • Forecasts of a large rebuilding budget lifted construction and materials names first
  • A disaster is a loss in itself, but rebuilding spending is revenue for some sectors. The market prices those separately
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 23.66% below its peak
  • The real problem, though, was not the quake but the strong yen that 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.