How far it fell, how long back, and what it did to your money.
Four steps, and the chart does the rest.
Pick the asset
Type a symbol or tap one of the chips. The S&P 500 loads first, so there is a full answer on screen before you type anything.
Say what you would have invested
The amount only translates each fall into money. It is never saved and never leaves your browser.
Read the chart from the top down
The top line is “at an all-time high”. Everything below it is how far under water the asset was that week, and the three deepest bottoms carry their depth.
Read the table for the dates
Each row is one crash: when it peaked, when it bottomed, how far it fell, and how long it took to get back to that peak.
The chart is easy to read. Comparing two of them is where people go wrong.
Read the “Since” column before you compare two funds. A fund that listed in 2019 has a shallower worst fall than one that listed in 1993 for a reason that has nothing to do with risk.
Recovery here is measured from the peak, not from the bottom. Counted off the bottom, 2008 looks like three years; counted back to break-even, it was nearly five.
Total return matters. On a price-only chart a dividend payer looks like it fell further than it did, because the payout leaves the price and never comes back.
The figure that decides whether you sell is the money, not the percentage. That is why every fall here is also shown as what your amount was worth at the bottom.
A tool that limits how much history you can load will quietly show you a shallower worst fall. If a page will not tell you when its series starts, it is not answering this question.
See what an investment would have grown to instead → What If I Invested
Deeper guides on our blog that build on the topics in this tool.
Every figure below is computed from the same daily total-return prices this tool uses. Not everything here has the same amount of history, so each row states the year its own series starts — a shorter history has simply met fewer crashes.
| Asset | Since | Worst fall | Time to recover |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 1993 | -55.2% | 4 years 10 months |
| Nasdaq 100 | 1999 | -83.0% | 14 years 11 months |
| Total world (VT) | 2008 | -50.3% | 2 years 6 months |
| Total US market (VTI) | 2001 | -55.5% | 4 years 5 months |
| Bitcoin | 2014 | -83.4% | 2 years 11 months |
| Ethereum | 2017 | -94.0% | 3 years 1 month |
| Gold (GLD) | 2004 | -45.6% | 8 years 11 months |
| Long Treasuries (TLT) | 2002 | -48.4% | Not yet |
| ARK Innovation (ARKK) | 2014 | -80.9% | Not yet |
| Tesla | 2010 | -73.6% | 3 years 1 month |
| Nvidia | 1999 | -89.7% | 4 years 10 months |
| Apple | 1980 | -81.8% | 4 years 10 months |
| SCHD | 2011 | -33.4% | 7 months |
| VWCE | 2019 | -33.4% | 11 months |
Daily closing prices with dividends reinvested, snapshotted 2026-09-10. Excludes trading costs, spreads, currency conversion and tax.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Drawdown | How far below its previous all-time high an investment is. Always zero or negative — zero means it is at a new high right now. |
| Underwater | Below a previous peak. The chart on this page is an underwater curve, where the length of a dip matters as much as its depth. |
| Peak | The last all-time high before a fall. Every drawdown on this page is measured from one, never from a recent high that was not a record. |
| Trough | The lowest point of a fall, before the recovery starts. Also called the bottom. |
| Recovery | The first day the price closes back at or above the peak it fell from. Until that day the fall is still open. |
| Volatility | How much an asset moves in an ordinary year, up or down. It is not the same thing as a crash — it is the everyday wobble a crash sits on top of. |
It fell -55.2%, from its peak on October 9, 2007 to the bottom on March 9, 2009, measured on total return with dividends reinvested. $10,000 invested at that peak was worth $4,481 at the bottom. Those figures come from the same daily prices this tool runs on, snapshotted September 10, 2026.
4 years 10 months, measured from the peak. The S&P 500 topped out on October 9, 2007, bottomed on March 9, 2009 and did not close back at that peak until August 16, 2012. Counting from the bottom instead gives a much shorter answer, which is why this page always says which end it counts from.
Longer than 2008: 6 years 7 months. The peak was March 24, 2000, the bottom October 9, 2002 at -47.5%, and the index did not close back at that peak until October 26, 2006.
6 months, measured from the peak. The S&P 500 fell -33.7% to its bottom on March 23, 2020 and closed back at its previous peak on August 10, 2020. The whole round trip fits inside a single year, which is unusual — 2008 took 4 years 10 months and the dot-com crash 6 years 7 months.
4 times in the 34 years this series covers, so about once every 9 years — though they have never arrived on a schedule. The table above lists each one with its dates. A fall is counted from a previous all-time high, so a further 20% drop before any new high is part of the same episode, not a new one.
How far below its previous best an investment is right now. If a fund's highest-ever value was 100 and it is 80 today, the drawdown is 20%. It is not the same as a loss — a loss is only realised if you sell — but it is what the account statement says while you hold on. The chart here is one long drawdown line, and it touches the top only when the asset is making a new high.
Three reasons, largest first. We measure total return with dividends reinvested, so a payer's fall looks shallower here than on a price-only chart, because the payouts cushioned it. We measure from the first day the asset traded, so a fund that listed in 2019 has no 2008 in it. And peaks are daily closing prices, not intraday highs, so the deepest intraday prints are not counted.
Of the assets on this page, SCHD has the shallowest worst fall at -33.4% — but its history starts in 2011, and a fund that has not met 2008 has not been tested by it. Check the “Since” column before comparing two worst falls, and read the whole crash table rather than the single deepest row.
This page shows what actually happened to a real price series — nothing more. An asset that recovered every time so far carries no promise that it will again, and the next fall will not be the last one. Prices exclude trading costs, spreads, currency conversion and taxes, all of which make a real-world fall worse than the one drawn here. Nothing on this page is investment advice; do your own research or speak to a regulated adviser before investing.
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