Nasdaq · April 3, 2001

The profit-warning pile-up

-6.17%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Nine months down without a rest

near the end of it · 2000-07-17 → 2001-04-04, -61.66% over the whole period

What happened that day?

On 3 April 2001 the Nasdaq fell 6.17% in a single day
The dot-com bust was a year old and had stopped being a problem only for bubble companies
Firms that actually sold things — telecom equipment, semiconductors — announced one after another that orders had collapsed
The cause was that demand from the internet companies that had been buying all that equipment simply vanished
When a bubble deflates, the bubble companies are not the only casualties. So are the companies that sold to them
A surprise Fed cut days later produced a big bounce, but the decline ran on to October 2002

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.