S&P 500 index- WORST YEAR IN HISTORY 2008

As of the market close last Thursday, Nov. 20, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 48.8% for the year to date.

Had the markets called it a year at that point, 2008 would have gone down as the worst year in the history of the S&P index, which goes back (in one form or another) to 1926.

The only year that even came close was 1931, in the teeth of the Great Depression, when the S&P lost 43.3%.

All this got me thinking: What was the worst year of all time? Regular daily securities trading began in New York on July 1, 1791, inside a coffee house on the corner of Wall and Water streets, where overcaffeinated brokers could pounce on the latest news moments after ships nudged into the docks on the East River. But trading was spotty and stocks were few for the first couple of decades. Only around 1815 were there enough stocks and sufficient trades for us to get a sense today of how the average stock performed back then.

Yale finance professor Will Goetzmann and his colleagues have built an index for NYSE stocks all the way back to 1815, so it’s not hard to answer the question of where 2008 ranked, as of Nov. 20, among the worst years of all time.

Here are the 20 worst years in history, based on Yale’s NYSE index until 1925, and for the S&P from 1926 onward:

1941 -11.6%
2001 -11.9%
1893 -12.3%
1857 -13.2%
1837 -13.4%
1828 -13.6%
1831 -14.0%
1973 -14.7%
1920 -15.0%
1841 -16.1%
1917 -16.4%
1884 -18.5%
1839 -19.0%
1907 -21.8%
2002 -22.1%
1930 -24.9%
1974 -26.5%
1937 -35.0%
1931 -43.3%
2008 -38.5