The Nasdaq's 2000 peak is more precise than the venture peak

The record

Two documents filed with the SEC, years apart, pin the same number to the same day. A shareholder letter inside Aegis Value Fund's annual report filing states that 'the NASDAQ Composite Index had just reached its March 10, 2000 peak of 5048.62,' written from the perspective of early 2001, about one year after the fact. A separate mutual-fund annual report, filed with the SEC by Schwab Annuity Portfolios for the year ended 31 December 2000, records that 'the NASDAQ composite index fell from its high of 5,048.62 in March to 2,470.52 at year end, a stunning decline of over 50%.' Both are SEC filings, not news reports, and both were written by market participants describing an index level they had just lived through.

What the sources establish

The two filings together establish an exact index figure, 5,048.62, an exact date, 10 March 2000, and a first-year decline of just over 50 percent by 31 December 2000. Neither filing concerns venture capital directly; both describe the Nasdaq Composite, a public-market index, not a private venture-funding total. For the venture side of the same period, the clearest still-published primary account is the National Venture Capital Association's own retrospective in its 2026 Yearbook, which states that 'the NASDAQ lost 78 percent of its value, VC fundraising contracted sharply, and startups failed by the hundreds,' a figure for the full peak-to-trough decline that reaches further than either 2001 shareholder letter, attached to no dollar total, unit, or period.

Scope and revision

The 51 percent and 78 percent figures are not contradictory; they describe different windows. The SEC filings measure the Nasdaq from its March 2000 peak to 31 December 2000, roughly nine months. NVCA's retrospective describes the fuller run to the eventual bottom, which market histories generally place in late 2002, a comparison this NVCA passage does not itself date. The venture-fundraising and venture-deployment contraction NVCA's account references carries no cited dollar figure, provider methodology, or measurement period here, which is a materially different kind of statement than an index closing price.

The decision in front of you

This is an editorial point, not advice. A single 'the market fell by some percentage in the dot-com crash' claim is not verifiable until it names a start date, an end date, and an index. The two SEC filings here show that even contemporaneous professional investors described the decline differently within a year of living through it.

• Does the cited decline give a start date and an end date, or only a season?
• Is the figure describing a public index, a private venture total, or both blended together?
• Whose measurement window produced the number, nine months, or the full multi-year trough?

The Nasdaq's 10 March 2000 peak is one of the few facts from this period pinned to the day and the decimal by parties writing shortly after it happened. The venture industry's own parallel low is real, but as recorded in NVCA's currently published account, it survives only as a rounded percentage, without the provider detail this desk requires before treating it as comparable to the exchange figure beside it.