US maximum drawdowns

A maximum drawdown is the largest loss an investor would have experienced by buying at a market peak and holding until the lowest point before the market reached a new high. This visualization shows the six worst US market drawdowns since 1975, each represented as a triangle aligned at its trough. The left vertex marks the pre-crash peak, the bottom the market low, and the right the point of full recovery. The 2007–2008 Financial Crisis saw the deepest drawdown (−50%) and a 46-month recovery. The Dot-com crash (−44%) showed similar timing. Black Monday 1987 fell sharply (−27%) but recovered in just 14 months. Recent crises rebounded faster: COVID-19 (−22%) recovered in 7 months, while the 2022 downturn (−20%) took 23 months.

Data: Monthly S&P 500 price data from Robert Shiller's long-term US stock market dataset (1975-2025).