What a start to the week, am I right? Monday turned out to be a wild, stressful day for Wall Street, as the Dow Jones plunged 1,175.21 points, or 4.6%, marking the worst single-day point drop ever for one of the most widely-watched indexes in the world. At one point, the Dow was down more than 1,500 points during late-afternoon trading.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq experienced big hits yesterday as well, falling 4.1% and 3.7%, respectively, while the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) reached an astounding 35.02, closing over 100% at the bell and marking its largest one-day percentage increase ever.
On the flip side, three U.S.-listed inverse VIX ETFs had to be halted from trading yesterday due to heavy losses: VelocityShares Inverse Vix Short-Term ETN XIV.P, ProShares Short VIX Short-Term Futures ETF SVXY.K and VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Medium-Term ETN ZIV.O all had short sell restrictions placed on them, according to Reuters.
This intense sell-off didn’t stay stateside, but spread around the world. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index briefly fell over 7% before closing down 4.73%. The Shanghai Composite index dipped 3.4% 3,370.35, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng plummeted 4.4% to 30,827.73. South Korea’s Kospi index declined 1.5% at the end of its trading day.
Over in Europe, shares hit a six-month low during the morning trading session. And by the end of the day, Germany’s DAX dropped 1.9%, while the French CAC 40 fell 1.9% as well. The FTSE 100, which tracks leading British shares, closed the day down 1.73%. Australia’s benchmark, the S&P ASX 200, slid 3.2%.
The pan-European Euro STOXX 600 fell for its seventh straight session, with banks and insurance stocks getting hit the hardest. Europe’s own main volatility gauge, the STOXX 50 index, surged 8.1 points to a high of 27.5, which is its biggest jump since the September 11 terrorist attacks, notes Reuters.
What the U.S. Markets are Looking Like Today
For the U.S. markets on Tuesday, the major indexes tried to recover from yesterday’s massive tumble. After falling over 500 points at the open, the Dow managed to gain 350 points. However, as of 11:30 AM EST, the index is down about 147 points, or 0.78%.
Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq composite rose into positive territory at the open, but while the S&P has now slipped back into the red, the tech-heavy Nasdaq has been able to stay in the green thanks to determined stocks like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) , NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) , and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) .
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