WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · May 18, 2009

May, as the recovery settled in

+3.04%

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 18 May 2009 the S&P 500 rose 3.04%
  • After the stress test results, banks were actually succeeding in raising capital in the market
  • Housing indicators were showing signs of bottoming around the same time. Housing was where the crisis started, so it mattered
  • The index had risen nearly thirty percent in the two and a half months since the March low
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • The dip before it was only 5.39% from the 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.