WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · April 5, 2001

Betting on another surprise cut

+8.92%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Seven weeks bought by rate cuts

early in it · 2001-04-04 → 2001-05-22, +41.19% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 5 April 2001 the Nasdaq rose 8.92% in a single day
  • Two days earlier, on 3 April, profit warnings had knocked it down hard
  • Expectation spread that the Fed would again cut outside a scheduled meeting, as it had in January
  • It did — an unscheduled cut came two weeks later on 18 April. The bet was right
  • The decline still did not stop. The Nasdaq kept falling until October 2002
  • It shows that rate cuts do not halt a bursting bubble. The problem was earnings, not rates

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.