Nasdaq · October 16, 2002

Handing back a week's gains, just past the bottom

-3.90%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The first seven weeks off the bottom

early in it · 2002-10-09 → 2002-11-27, +33.55% over the whole period

What happened that day?

16 October 2002 — the Nasdaq fell 3.90%. No single cause for that one day could be pinned down
The session before had risen sharply. The index had been climbing fast for several days after passing its episode low ten days earlier
Advances right off a bottom are usually this jagged. A big giveback does not mean the direction changed
The backdrop that year was accounting fraud and slowing earnings. Nothing yet confirmed the bottom was in
From late October the advance resumed and ran through the end of the year
From the late-June high to the 9 October low the index fell 27.79%
9 October was the final low of the whole dot-com unwind. That was only clear much later

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.