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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
You’ve consumed financial media (social, antisocial or otherwise) over the past day and a half, and you’ve encountered the phrase “Black Monday”.
Yesterday was, admittedly, a pretty wild time. But the S&P 500 closed pretty much flat, so everything must actually be fine.
Addicted to charting, we decided to raid Bloomberg’s historic open/high/low/close data for the S&P 500, and figure out just how “black” yesterday was on the Black Monday scales (we are already sure it was a Monday).
We didn’t just want to chart the day change; we also wanted to reflect some of the severe, start-of-week, intraday crapping-out that feels bad at the time but may not end up in the closing price.
So, for every Monday the S&P 500 has traded on since 1982* we compared the end-of-day loss with the maximum intraday trough, and scaled the dots based on the spread between the intraday peak and trough to capture a bit of swang. We’ve highlighted those days listed by veritable organ Wikipedia as a stock market Black Monday.
And, unsurprisingly, even with these tweaks there’s still only one real Black Monday from an S&P 500 perspective. Out in a zone of its own, 19 October 1987 remains a Monday like no other:
*
— Why does Wikipedia list the 16 September 2019 repo brouhaha as a Black Monday?
— For a smattering of days in the 1970s and early 1980s, Bloomberg lists the same price for open, high, low and close. We dunno what’s going on there, but that’s why our chart starts in 1982. Sourcing data remains hard.
Further listening:
— Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday
