WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · March 26, 2020

Rising despite a record jobless number

+6.24%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The COVID rebound

early in it · 2020-03-23 → 2020-08-18, +51.51% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The S&P 500 rose 6.24% on the day
  • That morning US weekly jobless claims came in at 3.28 million, close to five times the previous record
  • Shares rose anyway. The market of this period read worse data as meaning larger support
  • It came right after the Senate passed a two-trillion-dollar relief package that included cash paid directly to households
  • Data and prices moving in opposite directions looks strange, but prices are set on what comes next, not on now
  • That reading rested on support continuing, and the premise broke in 2022

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.