Wall Street suffered its worst day since April 2025 on Thursday 5 November 2026, as a sharp sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks dragged the major indexes down and erased a large part of the rally that had followed the midterm elections only a day earlier. The Nasdaq Composite entered a correction, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 1,800 points, and the S&P 500 recorded its steepest one-day fall in more than a year and a half. The scale of the decline, the speed with which it spread from chipmakers to almost every part of the market, and the political reaction that followed in the evening made it the defining market event of the post-election week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,833.06 points, or 3.44 percent, to close at 51,523.06. The S&P 500 dropped 4.36 percent, losing 334.89 points to finish at 7,353.73, in what was described as its worst day since April 2025. The Nasdaq Composite lost 5.52 percent, falling 1,421.52 points to 24,315.00, and closed 11.9 percent below its record reached on 6 October. A fall of 10 percent or more from a recent high is generally described as a correction, and on that measure the Nasdaq was firmly inside one by the close of trading on Thursday.
The losses were not confined to a handful of names. All 11 sectors of the S&P 500 ended the day lower, a breadth of decline that showed how completely the selling had taken hold. The Nasdaq-100, which tracks the largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq, sank 6.36 percent to 26,629.81. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, a closely watched gauge of chipmakers, plunged by more than 12 percent, its worst day since March 2020, when markets were in the grip of the first shock of the pandemic.
Nvidia, the chipmaker at the centre of the artificial intelligence boom, fell about 9.3 percent and was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500 during the session. Its decline alone pulled the broader market down, because of the size of the company and the weight it carries in the main indexes. Around it, other chip and artificial intelligence names fell sharply as well, and the selling fed on itself as investors who had crowded into the same trade rushed to reduce their exposure at the same time.
The value destroyed in the session was enormous. About 2 trillion dollars was wiped off the market value of the Nasdaq Composite on Thursday, according to estimates reported during the day. A separate measure, covering the Nasdaq-100, put the single-day loss at 2.3 trillion dollars, described as a record single-day erosion for that index. The two figures are different measures of different indexes, and they should not be confused with each other. The Composite figure covers the broader Nasdaq market, while the Nasdaq-100 figure covers the 100 largest non-financial constituents, and each tells its own part of the story of a day in which trillions of dollars of paper value disappeared in a few hours of trading.
Nasdaq correction November 2026: how the sell-off unfolded
The sell-off on Thursday reversed, in a single session, the optimism that had greeted the election result the day before. On Wednesday, the day after the midterm elections, the Dow had surged by more than 1,500 points in its best session since April 2025, as investors welcomed the outcome and pushed shares higher across the board. By Thursday evening, that entire gain, and more, had been given back. The swing from one of the best days of the year to one of the worst in the space of 24 hours was itself a measure of how unsettled the market had become.
The driving force behind the selling, as described in market commentary during the day, was a reassessment by investors of the vast spending on artificial intelligence data centres. For much of the past two years, the promise of artificial intelligence had been the most powerful force in the American stock market, lifting chipmakers, cloud providers and the companies building the infrastructure to support them. On Thursday, investors began to question whether that spending would produce the returns that had been assumed, and whether the pace of construction could be sustained at the level the market had priced in.
That reassessment followed the Democrats’ midterm sweep, but it was not a reaction to any policy that had actually been enacted. No data-centre ban had been passed by Congress, and no new law had changed the rules for building the facilities. What had changed was the political backdrop. Voters had just rejected data-centre projects in local ballots in a series of votes across the country, and newly elected governors had promised pauses on new construction. Investors, reading those signals, began to ask whether the buildout would slow, whether costs would rise, and whether the companies at the centre of the boom would be able to keep growing at the pace the market expected.
It is important to be clear about the distinction. The market fell because investors changed their minds about the future, not because demand for artificial intelligence had collapsed or because a law had been passed to stop the building. The reassessment was about the outlook: about permits, about local opposition, about power supply, about the sheer scale of the capital being committed, and about whether the returns would arrive quickly enough to justify it. In a market that had priced in a long and uninterrupted expansion, even a modest change in those assumptions was enough to trigger a violent repricing.
The selling began in the chip sector, where valuations had been stretched furthest, and then spread outward. Semiconductor stocks, which had led the market higher for months, led it lower on Thursday, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index’s fall of more than 12 percent was the clearest sign of how concentrated the damage was at the start. From there, the selling reached the large technology companies, then the broader Nasdaq, then the S&P 500, and finally the Dow. By the close, there was nowhere in the large-company market to hide, with every sector in the S&P 500 finishing lower.
AI stocks crash after midterms as investors reassess the data-centre buildout
The artificial intelligence trade had become, by the autumn of 2026, the single most important driver of the American stock market. The largest technology companies had committed enormous sums to building data centres, buying chips, and securing the power supplies needed to train and run artificial intelligence systems. Investors had rewarded that spending, pushing the shares of the companies involved to record highs and making the Nasdaq’s rise one of the defining stories of the year.
Thursday’s sell-off was a direct challenge to that story. The question investors were asking was not whether artificial intelligence would matter, but whether the spending on it had run ahead of the revenues it would generate, and whether the political environment for building the infrastructure would remain as favourable as it had been. The midterm results gave them reasons to doubt both propositions, even though nothing had yet changed in law.
Local voters had just delivered a striking verdict on data centres in ballots held on 3 November, rejecting projects or approving new restrictions in the overwhelming majority of the measures put to them. Governors-elect in states where the issue had been prominent had campaigned on pauses or moratoriums. For investors who had assumed that data centres could be built quickly and with limited opposition, those results were a warning that the path ahead might be slower, more expensive and more contested than the market had assumed.
Nvidia’s fall of about 9.3 percent was the most visible single casualty, but it was far from the only one. Across the chip sector, companies that had been valued on the assumption of unending demand for artificial intelligence hardware saw their shares fall sharply. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index’s drop of more than 12 percent, its worst since March 2020, captured the scale of the damage in a single number. For an index that had been one of the strongest performers of the past two years, it was a reminder of how quickly sentiment can turn when the central assumption behind a rally is questioned.
Global markets follow Wall Street lower as Asia opens sharply down
The selling did not stop at the American close. When Asian markets opened on Friday, they followed Wall Street lower, extending the rout into a second day and a second continent. Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell by more than 6 percent at the open, before trimming its losses to about 5.7 percent by midday. South Korea’s Kospi dropped 8.55 percent in early trading, a fall sharp enough to trigger a circuit breaker designed to pause trading when markets move too far too fast.
The Asian declines were a reminder of how closely the world’s stock markets are now tied together, and of how central the American technology sector has become to global portfolios. Chipmakers in South Korea and Japan, which supply the components and equipment used in artificial intelligence systems, were among the hardest hit, as investors applied the same reassessment to them that they had applied to their American counterparts the day before.
The global spillover also showed that the concerns behind the sell-off were not purely American. The artificial intelligence buildout is a global enterprise, involving suppliers, manufacturers and customers on several continents, and a reassessment of its pace in the United States has consequences for companies far beyond American borders. The circuit breaker in Seoul and the sharp opening fall in Tokyo were the clearest signs of that, as markets that had also ridden the artificial intelligence boom found themselves exposed to the same reversal.
Trump blames Democrats for the crash in Truth Social post
President Trump responded to the sell-off after the market closed, posting on Truth Social to blame the Democrats for the crash. In his post, he wrote: “The Stock Market suffered one of the Worst Days in History based on the results of the Election… it wasn’t Republicans, it was Dumocrats,” adding: “You only have yourselves to blame!” The message was posted on Thursday evening, hours after the closing bell, and it was his first public reaction to the day’s trading.
The post framed the sell-off as a direct consequence of the election result, and of the Democrats’ midterm victories in particular. That framing was in sharp contrast to the market commentary during the day, which had attributed the selling to investors reassessing the artificial intelligence buildout and the outlook for data-centre construction. The president’s version placed the blame squarely on the political outcome, and on the party that had won the election, rather than on a change in investors’ views about valuations or spending.
The timing of the post was also significant. It came on the same day that Mr Trump had signed a proclamation designating the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room as a national monument, his first official action since the midterm losses. The market post, coming later in the evening, was a second and very different kind of response to the election: not a ceremonial act, but a direct political argument about who was responsible for a day in which trillions of dollars of market value had disappeared.
The post also highlighted the political stakes of the market’s performance. For a president who has frequently pointed to the stock market as a measure of his economic stewardship, a day in which the Dow fell by more than 1,800 points and the Nasdaq entered a correction was a difficult one to explain. By blaming the Democrats, Mr Trump sought to shift the responsibility for the fall onto the party that had just won control of Congress, and to frame the sell-off as a warning about what Democratic control would mean for the economy.
Democrats, for their part, had campaigned in part on the costs and consequences of the data-centre buildout, including the pressure it places on electricity supplies and the prices paid by households. The market’s reaction, in that light, could be read as investors taking seriously the possibility that the political environment for the buildout was about to change. That reading does not require any law to have been passed. It requires only that investors believe the political balance has shifted, and that the shift will eventually be reflected in policy, in permits, and in the pace at which new facilities can be built.
What the correction means and what comes next
A correction, in market language, is a fall of 10 percent or more from a recent high. It is a common event in stock market history, and it does not by itself mean that a bear market, generally defined as a fall of 20 percent or more, is under way. The Nasdaq’s fall of 11.9 percent from its 6 October record put it inside correction territory, but still well short of a bear market. The distinction matters, because corrections are often followed by recoveries, while bear markets tend to be longer and deeper. At the same time, a correction that arrives as violently as this one did, with a single-day fall of more than 5 percent, is a warning that the market’s confidence has been shaken.
The immediate question for investors was whether Thursday’s selling was the end of the reassessment or only the beginning. The fact that the market had fallen so far so fast, and that the VIX had jumped by 61 percent, suggested that fear was running high and that further volatility was likely. The fact that the selling had spread to Asia overnight suggested that the reassessment was not confined to American traders. And the fact that the political argument about the cause of the fall had already begun suggested that the market would remain entangled with politics for some time to come.
What happens next will depend on whether investors conclude that the reassessment has gone far enough, or whether they believe there is further to fall. The market’s history suggests that corrections often end when buyers decide that prices have fallen enough to reflect the new outlook, and that the selling exhausts itself. It also suggests that the process can take weeks, and that sharp falls are often followed by sharp rebounds, as well as by further declines. Thursday’s session, the worst since April 2025, was a powerful signal that the market’s mood had changed. Whether it was also the bottom will only become clear in the days and weeks that follow.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Reuters, Gulf News and Channel News Asia.