S&P 500 · May 4, 2022

The words that ruled out three-quarters

+2.99%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The 2022 inflation bear market

midway through · 2022-01-03 → 2022-10-12, -25.43% over the whole period

What happened that day?

On 4 May 2022 the S&P 500 rose 2.99%
The Fed raised by two steps at once that day, the largest move in twenty-two years
But at the press conference the chair said a larger step was not something the committee was actively considering
That larger step was exactly what the market feared. Ruling it out brought a wave of relief buying
The rally lasted precisely one day. The index fell further the next session than it had risen on this one
A price lifted by one sentence disappears when the arithmetic is redone. Two months later the Fed did make the larger move
In this stretch the index was 23.51% below its peak

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.