October 7, 2008
The thrashing continued for another session, with the three indices falling more than five percent, their sharpest drop since the previous Tuesday. While the NASDAQ has 29 previous days with losses exceeding five percent, the S&P500 has only 13 such occurrences while there are 12 for the DJIA.
For the NASDAQ, these days happened mostly in 2000 and 2001 when in its sharpest drop ever, it encountered 20 closes worse than five percent . The losses for the other two indices are more evenly distributed, even though they cluster in the same two years.
Five successive down days are quite rare, with only some 220 since 1950 for the DJIA and the S&P500, or occurring on 1.48 percent of all trading days. But so far, since January 2000, there have been proportionately fewer, accounting for just .77 percent of all closes.
The NASDAQ record, however, of 1.5 percent of all days with five-day losing strings, is twice as many as the other indices.
DJIA -5.11 percent
NASDAQÂ… -5.80 percent
S&P500 -5.74 percent