20 January 2009: Stocks greet a new president with a plunge
On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, the S&P 500 fell more than 5% and the Dow dropped 332 points, the worst Inauguration Day market performance on record. Bank shares led the decline amid fears of fresh losses and possible nationalizations. Hope was in the air on the National Mall, but not on Wall Street. The market would sink further before bottoming in March. Politics and portfolios keep different calendars.
The lesson: Markets respond to balance sheets and earnings, not to speeches, however historic the occasion.
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
Play Sixty-40