S&P 500 · May 24, 1973
A spring bounce while politics ran the news
+2.95%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The 1973–74 oil shock bear market
early in it · 1973-01-11 → 1974-10-03, -48.20% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 24 May 1973 — the S&P 500 rose 2.95% to close at 107.14. No single cause can be pinned to the day
- That spring the investigation around the American president was the daily news. Unstable politics makes companies postpone decisions
- The dollar was shaking at the same time. The fixed-rate system had broken the year before and nobody knew where currencies would settle
- Inflation was already running fast. The government kept freezing prices directly and then releasing them
- A market that has fallen a long way produces bounces of a few days. This session and the next both rose
- From the mid-February high to the late-August low the index fell 13.92%
- Then the oil embargo arrived in the autumn and it became a much longer decline
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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.