Nasdaq · February 10, 2009

When the plan disappointed

-4.20%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

A halving that took seventeen months

near the end of it · 2007-10-31 → 2009-03-09, -55.63% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The Nasdaq fell 4.2% to close at 1,524.73. No single trigger for the day could be pinned down
Around this time the American government was preparing a plan for what to do with banks' bad assets
Sometimes an announcement does not lift prices. If the direction is right but the method is undecided, the market reads it as unfinished
The episode fell 31.21% from the October 2008 high to the March 2009 low. This day sits near its end
The signature of that winter was that prices swung hard on every policy headline — hope and disappointment alternating
The bottom came less than a month later, on 9 March

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.