Stock Market Crash Statistics, Dates & Recovery Times

In this guide, we look at the biggest stock market crashes, why they happened and how long the economy took to recover.

Equity markets around the world, led by the S&P 500 index, have been in an uptrend for at least the last three years, and one could argue that equities have been on the ascent since 2015 or even 2009.

Although making your case for this would largely depend on the time scales of the charts you used, and your definition of an uptrend or bull market. However, I think we can all agree that the direction of travel in the chart below, a monthly plot of the S&P 500 and its 50-period moving average, is upward.

But, stock markets are cyclical and are ultimately driven by greed and fear, and when there has been too much greed, sentiment swings and fear rapidly gets the upper hand. At that point, we often see a market crash. This guide explains and provides statistics for some of the most infamous market corrections of the last 100 years.

Source: Barchart.com

• Related reading: How to predict a stock market crash and what you can do about it

Stock market crash recovery times

Stock markets crash for a variety of reasons, how quickly they recover largely depends on how quickly sentiment can be repaired.

However, trader sentiment won’t bounce back if most or all tof heir capital has been wiped out by the correction.

Excess leverage was behind at least two of the crashes in the table below.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.  Both of which required concerted effort on a global scale to overcome.

The depression caused by the crash in 1929 was really only ended by the start of WWII.

Whilst the GFC necessitated bailouts by governments and the deployment of large-scale alternative monetary policy, and massive liquidity injections from major central banks.

Stock Market Crash	Index	Peak Value & Date	Trough Value & Date	Index Decline (%)	Recovery Time (Months)
Wall Street Crash (1929)	DJIA	381.17 (Sep 1929)	41.22 (Jul 1932)	89.20%	300
1973–1974 Bear Market	DJIA	1,051.70 (Jan 1973)	577.60 (Dec 1974)	44.00%	96
Black Monday (1987)	DJIA	2,722 (Aug 1987)	1,738.74 (Oct 1987)	36.70%	54
Dotcom Bubble (2000–2002)	Nasdaq	5,048.62 (Mar 2000)	1,139.90 (Oct 2002)	77.80%	180
Global Financial Crisis	S&P 500	1,576.09 (Oct 2007)	676.53 (Mar 2009)	56.00%	51.6
September 11 Attacks (2001)	S&P 500	1,172.51 (Sep 2001)	1,040.94 (Sep 2001)	11.00%	0.6
China-Linked Sell-Off (2015)	S&P 500	2,130.82 (May 2015)	1,867.01 (Aug 2015)	12.40%	3
COVID-19 Panic (2020)	S&P 500	3,386.15 (Feb 2020)	2,237.40 (Mar 2020)	33.90%	4.7

Source: Darren Sinden

As we can see the Wall Street Crash and the GFC caused two of the biggest market corrections in percentage terms.

However, the correction is not the only feature of a crash, another key factor is the time that it takes the market to recover to its prior high.

The bear market that started in 1973/74 dragged on for 8-years, as the spectre of stagflation and rolling energy crises hampered the recovery.

The dotcom boom and bust of the early 2000s was perhaps the nearest that we have come to the Tulip mania in 17th century Holland in modern times.

To put it bluntly we had too much leverage and a mono-directional market, until we ran out of “greater fools” or buyers which is why it took 180 months or 15 years for the Nasdaq to regain its prior peaks.

Some commentators have drawn parallels between the dotcom era and the current hyperbole that surrounds AI.

Where huge sums are being invested by businesses for very little in the way of tangible returns. And there is no guarantee that these investments will even bare fruit.

Why well because they could be eclipsed by rapid technological breakthroughs, such as we saw with the release of the open source Chinese AI DeepSeek, in late January 2025.

As an individual trader you can’t prevent a market crash all you can do is try to read the trends and market sentiment and to try and position your portfolio such that it can weather the storm when it inevitably comes.

The most significant stock market crashes of the last 100 years

The charts below highlight examples of market crashes, in each case, the bull market was in full swing ahead of the correction, and whilst there were warning signs, most traders shrugged them off and carried on as normal, that is, until they couldn’t ignore the change in sentiment any longer.

It’s usually a confluence of factors that causes a hiatus in the markets, but there are exceptions. The most obvious of which was the emergence of Coronavirus; however, the terror attacks of September 2001 are another.

• The green vertical lines in the charts highlight the point at which market sentiment started to change.
• The magenta horizontal lines capture the peak and trough of the move and the point at which the markets recovered those highs.

Coronavirus Crash (2020)

The most recent market crash was caused by the emergence and rapid spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus. In response, governments worldwide initiated country-wide lockdowns—something we hadn’t experienced before. Markets hate uncertainty and there was a state of near panic as investors feared that the global economy was going to shut down. That turned out not to be the case, and working from home, social distancing and vaccines against COVID-19 kept economies and trade functioning despite ongoing lockdowns and stocks rallied just as quickly as they had sold off.

Source: Barchart.com

Chinese Stock Market Crash (2015)

Chinese stock markets grew rapidly in the aftermath of the GFC (see below) as authorities in Beijing stimulated the economy, and encouraged retail trading and investment in domestic equities. Which pushed Chinese indices higher. Indeed, between February and early June 2015, the Shanghai Composite index rallied by more than +55.0% moving into bubble territory.

A devaluation of the Yuan and perceived weakening in China’s economy in August 2015 combined to burst that bubble. The chart below shows the S&P 500 overlayed by KWEB, the China Internet ETF, which sold off ahead of the US index.

Source: Barchart.com

Global Financial Crisis (2007-2009)

Once again excessive leverage was the root of this crash.

This time, however, it was not individual traders who were over exposed but rather the banks and other financial institutions.

Their exposure wasn’t to the stock market but to credit markets with lending practices that at their most extreme allowed those with no job or income to get a mortgage. Banks and insurance companies also created, speculated and insured against the default of securitised mortgages and credit, and credit derivatives.

When the so-called subprime borrowers started to default on their mortgages, this house of cards came tumbling down, credit markets dried up, and banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went to the wall. Confidence evaporated and the stock market rapidly sold off.

Source: Barchart.com

September 11th Attacks (2001)

On September 11th 2001, the US mainland came under direct attack by foreign terrorists. Something that had rarely happened in the past. Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network hijacked passenger airliners and used those planes as flying bombs, to strike at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

When the first plane struck one of the twin towers, it was thought to be a tragic accident, when a second plane flew into the other tower, live on TV, it became clear it was anything but.

US equity markets had already been selling off in the weeks before the attacks but capitulated as the iconic towers collapsed.

Source: Barchart.com

Dotcom Bubble Bursts (2002)

The dotcom boom and bust of the early 2000s was perhaps the nearest that we have come to the Tulip mania, in 17th century Holland, in modern times.

To put it bluntly, we had too much leverage and a mono-directional market, in which stocks whose business models had even a cursory attachment to the internet soared in value.

Some companies even rebranded to add the suffix .Com to their name. The rally continued until we ran out of “greater fools” or new buyers. And at that point reality set in and the market crashed, billions were lost and many traders were wiped out. Which is why it took so long for the market to regain and exceed its prior peaks.

Source: Barchart.com

Black Monday (1987)

The markets’ first taste of the power of program trading.

A strategy called portfolio insurance, which was developed in the US, aimed to hedge institutional equity investments by selling index futures against, and if the market moved lower, it would sell more futures. The only trouble was that the hedge for index futures traders was to sell baskets of equities which drove down the value of the institutional equity portfolios. institutions sold more equity index futures, effectively generating a negative feedback loop.

Program trading wasn’t the direct cause of the 1987 crash, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s, or should that be the market’s back, the feedback loop it created helps to explain the precipitous fall in the S&P 500 index over this period.

Source: Barchart.com

Bear Market Crash (1973-1974)

The roots of this crash can be traced back to the end of WWII, the Bretton Woods agreement, the adoption of the gold standard and perhaps most important, the US reliance on imported oil. In October 1973, an Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on the holiday of Yom Kippur. The fighting lasted for 19 days with the US resupplying the Israeli military.

Arab members of OPEC announced an embargo on oil exports to the US in response, and oil prices spiked higher and equities sold off.

Source: Trading Economics

Wall Street Crash (1929)

The most infamous equity market crash, and one that kickstarted the Great Depression that dogged the early 1930s. The causes were a combination of the excessive use of margin trading, where brokers and banks lent money to investors against the value of their portfolios, and an Investment Trust boom that was fueled by cross holdings between the trusts.

Confidence evaporated on October 24th, also known as Black Thursday. Intervention in the market created a brief pause on Friday. However, margin calls posted over the weekend created a fresh round of selling on Monday, and a second downward leg on Tuesday, which created a combined fall of -23.0% over the two days. By July 1932, the Dow Jones index had lost almost 90.0% of its pre-crash value.

Source: Trading Economics

Stock market crashes are driven by sentiment

Of course markets are driven by sentiment and animal spirits, and as such they don’t move in a straight line. Rather, they are cyclical, reflecting the ebb and flow of fear and greed among investors, which itself is driven by expectations about the economy, interest rates, future earnings and more.

We often talk about crowds in the markets, a throwback to the days of face to face trading on a market floor.

However, crowds still exist in today’s on-line electronic markets, and if anything their influence is even more important today than it ever was.

Crowd behaviour can help to create stock market bubbles, and also corrections or crashes.

It’s important to remember that sentiment changes on the margins, and then spreads out across the rest of the crowd.

This kind of behaviour isn’t limited to stock market traders either, and we can almost exact find parallels in nature.

In the mid-2000s André Ancel of the University of Strasbourg, and his colleagues, studied 3,000 or so breeding pairs of Emperor Penguins, that live on Antarctica’s Pointe Géologie Archipelago.

The Science News website recalls that:

“Ancel and his team had hypothesized that huddle breakups would most often be initiated from the center, where penguins were the warmest. But that only happened once. “

“More often, it was an individual near the edge that initiated the breakup — usually as he departed, but in one case two penguins started it by getting into a fight. Within two minutes of initiation, the breakup was complete, and the huddle dispersed.”

Crowds in the stock market can be supportive of traders with like-minded views and similar positions. Indeed when a bubble forms traders only seek out the opinions of those that are likely to agree with them, and screen out contra views, news and opinions.

However, as with the Penguins, who huddle together to keep warm, stock market crowds can be quickly dispersed, when new information comes to light, or the bubble bursts.

Knowing when to quit

Being in the markets is like being at a giant party, that goes on too long, it’s fun until everyone heads for the exit at the same time.

When sentiment changes and the bubble bursts, fear overcomes greed, and the crowd liquidate their positions, anxious to preserve what profits they can.

However it’s often the case that by this stage the crowd is over exposed, over leveraged, under capitalised and all in on high beta stocks.

That is stocks that are very sensitive to sharp moves in the sectors and indices, of which they are constituents.

These stocks all tend to move in the same direction at once. And under those circumstances it rarely ends well.