Stats › Bear markets and drawdowns › COVID crash 2020
The 2020 COVID crash
Here's the thing most people get wrong about 2020. The size of the fall was ordinary. The S&P 500 lost 33.92%, and the average bear market since 1929 lost 35.2%. What made it extraordinary was that it did the whole thing in 33 days. Every record that got broken that spring, the volatility reading, the trading halts, the individual days, follows from the speed and not from the depth.
This page walks through that episode. Where it sits against every other bear market on speed and on depth, the four days in March that made the record books in both directions, the circuit breaker halts, and the recovery that arrived faster than anyone expected. It's a case study rather than a statistic, and I put it here because it's the clearest single example I've got of two things that are hard to teach any other way: what an actual crash feels like from the inside, and why the best days and the worst days keep turning up in the same week.
The figures come from five separate places, each linked at the foot of the page with the period it covers. I've tried to attribute every individual number to the source it came from rather than blending them, and where a claim is anomalous I've said so in the text instead of leaving you to find out later.
Between 19 February and 23 March 2020 the S&P 500 fell 33.92% in 33 calendar days, the fastest bear market on record. It produced the highest VIX close in history at 82.69, four circuit breaker halts inside eight trading sessions, and three of the largest single day moves ever recorded, in both directions. It is also the shortest bear market of the modern era: the index reached a new all time high in August 2020, about five months after the bottom.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 5 named sources, roughly 1350 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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