Stats › Bear markets and drawdowns › 1929 crash
The Wall Street crash of 1929
Everyone knows the phrase Wall Street crash. What most people picture is a couple of terrible days in October 1929 and then the Depression. The days were real. They were not the event. The market kept falling for nearly three more years after them, and it took more than twenty five years to get back to where it started.
This page lays out the exact record. The peak, the bottom, the individual days that still hold records almost a century later, and the date the old high was finally regained. I put it together because 1929 is what people reach for whenever they want to argue that stocks are dangerous, and it's usually quoted without the two details that matter most. One is that the famous panic days were nowhere near the low. The other is that some of the largest single day gains ever recorded happened inside the decline rather than after it.
There's also a section on how this period gets counted, which sounds dry and isn't. Two respected sources turn the same episode into either five bear markets or one, and that choice quietly distorts every average bear market statistic you will ever be handed. Three sources, all linked and dated below. The Federal Reserve account in particular is short and worth reading in the original.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 381.17 on 3 September 1929 and bottomed at 41.22 on 8 July 1932, a decline of about 89%. It did not regain the 1929 high until 23 November 1954, more than twenty five years later. The famous days are Black Monday, 28 October 1929, down about 13%, and Black Tuesday, 29 October, down about 12%. Both remain in the top five worst days in S&P Composite history, and neither was the bottom: the market fell for almost three more years afterwards.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 3 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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