S&P 500 · May 8, 2002
A spring bounce inside a bear market
+3.75%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The dot-com bust hits the S&P 500
near the end of it · 2000-03-24 → 2002-10-09, -49.15% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The S&P 500 rose 3.75% to close at 1,088.85. No single trigger for the day could be pinned down
- Around this time the market was swinging day to day on results from telecom-equipment and chip companies
- In a market that already expects bad, one less-bad result is enough to send prices jumping
- Such bounces do not turn a market. The reasons to sell had not gone away, only been postponed
- The episode fell 31.84% from the March high to the July low. This is a bounce inside it
- The real bottom of the year came in the autumn
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.