Stats › Best and worst days › Largest daily moves
Largest one day moves in stock market history
Most trading days are dull. The market moves a fraction of a percent, nobody remembers it, and a year is made up of hundreds of them. Then there are the days that end up with their own names. This page is the list of those days, the largest single session moves in the history of the S&P 500 and the Dow, up and down, with dates attached.
Two things jump out once you line them up. The first is that they cluster. Almost everything on both lists comes from four episodes: the 1929 to 1933 stretch, October 1987, the autumn of 2008 and March 2020. The second is that the best days and the worst days are neighbours. They don't turn up in calm markets, they turn up in the same fortnight as each other. I built the page mostly for that second point, because it quietly undermines the idea that you could be out for the bad sessions and in for the good ones. The other thing worth noticing is that Black Monday sits on its own. It's roughly two thirds larger than the next worst session, and it's the direct reason market wide circuit breakers exist.
Everything here is percentage change against the previous close, which is the only basis that works across an index that has risen from 17 to over 6,000. There's a Dow table as well, which doesn't always agree with the S&P 500, because the Dow is price weighted and holds thirty companies. If you want to argue with a number, both lists are linked at the foot of the page.
The worst day in S&P 500 history is Black Monday, 19 October 1987, at -20.47%. The Dow fell -22.61% the same session. The best day is 15 March 1933, +16.61%, during the bank holiday reopening. Almost every entry on both lists comes from four clusters: 1929 to 1933, October 1987, autumn 2008, and March 2020. The most recent addition to the top ten gains is 9 April 2025 at +9.52%, tied for eighth.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 3 tables and 3 named sources, roughly 1100 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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