WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · October 10, 2018

The day rates pushed shares out

-3.29%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Q4 2018 selloff

early in it · 2018-09-20 → 2018-12-24, -19.78% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The S&P 500 fell 3.29% on the day
  • The US ten-year yield passed 3.2 percent, its highest in seven years
  • Rising rates reduce the relative appeal of shares, because the interest you can earn without taking risk goes up
  • The Fed had raised four times that year and said it would keep going
  • Earnings were good — corporate profits had jumped on that year's tax cut. Shares fell anyway, because the yardstick for pricing them had changed
  • The decline ran to 24 December, taking close to a fifth off the S&P 500

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.