Nasdaq · January 4, 2000
The Warning on the First Day of 2000
-5.55%
single-day change vs previous close
What happened that day?
- 4 January 2000 — first full session of the year, Nasdaq Composite fell 5.55%
- Companies had spent heavily on tech to prepare for Y2K, and that demand showed up in earnings and lifted prices
- When the new year arrived without incident, investors began calculating that the demand would now disappear
- The decline didn't last. The Nasdaq rose again over the next two months to a record high in March
- Which is why the drawdown stopped at 19.6%
- In hindsight a warning nobody read as one. The real turning point came three months later
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.