9/11 and the stock market

On 11-Sep-2001, 19 members from al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger jets. Two were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth jet crashed into a field in Pennsylvannia before it reached its target in Washington DC (Wikipedia).

Below I present a table of the values of ASX (FTSE All Share Index):

05-Jan-2011 2976

14-Sep-2011 2306

21-Sep-2011 2128 (lowest point)

04-Jan-2002 2580

11-Sep-2011 2706

The index dropped 22.5% from the start of the year to 14 September. If you had bought at that point, then by the end of the year, you would have made 11.9% profit; whilst the index returned -13.3% (negative) over the year as a whole. If you had been especially prescient - and there's no real indication that you would have been - and bought at the lowest point, then the index would have dropped 28.5% in the period from the start of the year to 21-Sep-2011, and subsequently gained 21.2% to year-end.

I do not have a value for ASX at 11-Sep-2011, so I need to use the one for 14-Sep-2011. During the decade since then, the ASX has returned an average compound rate of 1.6% pa, excluding dividends. If you had bought at the year-end, then the comparable return would have been approximately 0.5% pa.