WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · April 9, 1990

A short spring retrace

+3.82%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The bubble's first leg down

midway through · 1989-12-29 → 1990-10-01, -48.04% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 9 April 1990 the Nikkei 225 rose 3.82%
  • The index had fallen nearly thirty percent in the three months since the start of the year
  • A market that has fallen far bounces hard on small news, because there are fewer sellers left
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 28.94% below its peak
  • This bounce did not turn the slide. The low came that October

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.