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https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/stock-market

Was looking at the graph above for the Venezuela Stock Market and the Caracas Stock Exchange Stock Market Index crashed 99.90% over the weekend of March 15th, 2021. It dropped from 2,700,000 to 2,700.

What happened and why did the stocks crash? I can't find anything about it in the news.

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    The fact that the "crash" was the elimination of exactly three zeros should inform you that it's something artificial, not an actual crash.
    – RonJohn
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 14:01
  • @RonJohn Three zeros went away; nothing was lost, three times over.
    – Yakk
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 14:03
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    A picture is worth a thousand words.... moreso when it is built out of numbers.
    – J...
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 14:55
  • @Yakk your comment puzzles me, because it seems to imply that I think something was lost, when I said no such thing.
    – RonJohn
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 22:22
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    @ronjohn An @ does not mean "you are wrong". The things that were lost were each nothing; and three of them where lost.
    – Yakk
    Commented May 26, 2021 at 1:41

1 Answer 1

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Not a crash, an adjustment. Because of the insane inflation, they have adjusted it periodically by dividing by 1000. Last one was March 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Dndice_Burs%C3%A1til_de_Capitalizaci%C3%B3n

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    So it's the market-level equivalent of a stock split -- the numbers change, but the values don't.
    – Barmar
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 15:26
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    @Mattman944: "Didn't want to bother" is most likely (by Occam's razor): "the tool makers didn't foresee this happening, and so did not add code to address this".
    – sharur
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 16:26
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    @Kevin I'm less cynical, but then I am a software developer. So from my "in the trenches" point of view, its more of a "handling this wasn't in our requirements" thing than a "we did the cost benefit analysis and decided against it" thing.
    – sharur
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 18:43
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    @sharur: For the programmers in the trenches, yes, it’s “it wasn’t in the requirements”. But those requirements come from somewhere, and the people setting them probably either did a cost-benefit analysis and decided against it, or else it was never big enough on their radar to merit a cost-benefit analysis at all.
    – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 22:23
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    I wonder how many automated software trade bots either bought or sold after that change. It possibly wasn't in their requirements either.
    – Thomas Weller
    Commented May 26, 2021 at 11:15

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