WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · April 1, 2016

The day the fiscal year turned

-3.55%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Two and a half years the world rose together

early in it · 2016-02-12 → 2018-10-02, +62.32% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 1 April 2016 the Nikkei 225 fell 3.55%, on the first day of Japan's fiscal year
  • A quarterly survey of business sentiment came out that morning and was worse than expected
  • It is also the point at which the support that holds prices up for the March book close disappears
  • The yen had been strengthening since the start of the year — despite negative rates
  • That the central bank could not weaken its own currency was the market's underlying worry
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 25.01% 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.