WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · February 24, 2009

A bounce two weeks from the bottom

+4.01%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Global Financial Crisis bear market

near the end of it · 2007-10-09 → 2009-03-09, -56.78% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 24 February 2009 the S&P 500 rose 4.01%
  • What the market feared most was nationalisation of the banks, which would wipe out existing shares
  • That day the Fed chair told Congress that nationalisation was not the plan
  • With one worst case removed, bank shares jumped hard
  • The index's real bottom still came two weeks later, on 9 March
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 32.73% 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.