22 August 2013: Nasdaq freezes for three hours
A technical problem with the system that distributes price quotes forced Nasdaq to halt trading in all of its listed stocks for about three hours, freezing shares of Apple, Google, Microsoft and thousands of others. Investors could not buy or sell. Markets reopened calmly and nothing catastrophic happened, but the outage raised questions about how fragile highly automated markets had become. Long-term investors barely needed to notice.
The lesson: Long-term investors can shrug off technical glitches that only matter to people trading by the second.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Nasdaq 100 index fund at the start of 2015 → $5,714 today, vs $3,301 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2015, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 5.7 times the money, and $2,413 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Nasdaq 100 index fund teaches: A great industry bought at a crazy price can take fifteen years to break even, so the price paid matters even when the story turns out right.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $4,200 | $5,714 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $6,500 | $3,692 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $8,700 | $2,759 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Nasdaq 100 index fund? Every starting year and the full story →
More Nasdaq 100 index fund history
- 8 February 1971: Nasdaq opens for business
- 10 March 2000: The Nasdaq peaks at 5,048
- 14 April 2000: The Nasdaq drops nearly 10% in a day
- 10 June 2020: The Nasdaq closes above 10,000
- 9 August 1995: Netscape's IPO kicks off the dot-com era
- 31 December 1999: Nasdaq ends its best year ever
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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