WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · June 22, 2009

Had it come too fast?

-3.06%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Eighty percent in a year off the bottom

early in it · 2009-03-09 → 2010-04-23, +79.93% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 22 June 2009 the S&P 500 fell 3.06%
  • The World Bank cut its forecast for global growth that day
  • The index had risen a long way in the three months since the March low, and people questioned whether the real economy was keeping up
  • Share prices move before the economy. The question is how far before. Too far ahead and there is a give-back
  • Unemployment was still rising, and would peak that October
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 7.09% 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.