If you've felt like the market has lurched from one crisis to the next since 2020, you're not imagining it. A pandemic, the fastest interest rate hikes in forty years, a war in Europe, an election that reshaped trade policy overnight, and two separate military conflicts involving Iran — all in five and a half years.
And yet, through all of it, global equity markets are dramatically higher than where they started. That's not an accident, and it's not luck. It's the pattern that shows up in every single one of these episodes: a sharp, frightening drop, followed by a recovery that almost always outlasts the fear that caused the drop in the first place.
Here's the timeline, event by event — what happened, what it did to share prices, and which parts of the market took the hit while others quietly picked up the slack.
A quick note on the numbers below: figures like "7,800" or "6,400" are S&P 500 index points — a weighted measure of 500 companies' share prices combined into a single number — not dollars, rand, or a share price of any one company.
The COVID crash: the fastest bear market on record
The S&P 500 peaked on 19 February 2020. Over the following five weeks, as it became clear the world was heading into lockdown, the index fell 34%.
It remains the fastest descent into a bear market in modern history — the 2008 financial crisis took roughly seventeen months to do similar damage; COVID did it in five weeks. Trading was halted by circuit breakers three times in a single week in mid-March as the selling became disorderly.
Airlines, cruise lines and hospitality were devastated as travel stopped overnight. Energy was arguably worse off still — oil demand collapsed so completely that U.S. crude briefly traded at a negative price in April 2020, something that had never happened before.
Anything that let people work, shop or be entertained from home. Video-conferencing, e-commerce and streaming names saw demand pull forward by years in a matter of weeks.
What makes March 2020 the textbook case study, though, is what happened next.
The recovery: back to record highs within five months
The market bottomed on 23 March 2020 and had fully recovered to its pre-crash level by August — just five months later. By the end of 2020, despite a global pandemic still raging, the S&P 500 finished the year up around 18%. 2021 added a further 27%.
Technology and e-commerce companies led the charge back, followed by a broader rally as vaccine rollouts began in early 2021 and reopening trades (travel, leisure, small-caps) caught up.
Traditional energy and many brick-and-mortar retailers took much longer to recover — some sectors were still below their pre-COVID share prices well into 2021, even as the broader index sat comfortably above its old highs.
This is the first illustration of a pattern that repeats through every cycle in this timeline: the investor who panicked and sold in March 2020 "to wait for things to settle down" typically missed the single best trading day in market history up to that point (a 9.4% jump on 24 March) and the months of recovery that followed. History shows that a large share of the market's best individual days cluster right around its worst days — which is precisely why staying invested through the fear tends to matter more than trying to time an exit.
2022: inflation, rate hikes, and the reset nobody wanted
Two years of easy money and pandemic stimulus caught up with the world in 2022. Inflation hit a 40-year high, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February sent global energy and food prices sharply higher on top of that. The U.S. Federal Reserve responded with the fastest run of interest rate hikes in more than four decades, and growth-oriented shares — which had led the recovery — were repriced hard.
The S&P 500 fell into a bear market in June 2022 and finished the year down close to 19%, its worst year since 2008. The Nasdaq, far more concentrated in technology, fell around 33%.
Technology and, in particular, communication services (Meta and Netflix among them) were the worst-performing sectors of the entire S&P 500. Apple alone shed over $800 billion in market value that year — the largest dollar loss of any single company. High-growth, unprofitable tech and crypto-linked names fared even worse.
Energy was the standout winner — the one major sector to post strong gains while almost everything else fell, driven by the surge in oil and gas prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The market found its bottom in October 2022 — a low point that, in hindsight, marked the start of a new bull market that has run, with interruptions, ever since.
The AI rally and the "Trump trade"
ChatGPT's public launch in late 2022 kicked off a rush of investment into artificial intelligence infrastructure that reshaped market leadership for the next several years. The S&P 500 rose 24% in 2023 and roughly another 23–25% in 2024 — back-to-back years of strong double-digit gains driven overwhelmingly by a small handful of mega-cap technology companies that came to be known as the "Magnificent Seven": Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla.
Nvidia rose roughly 240% in 2023 alone on AI chip demand, and continued climbing through 2024. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Tesla all significantly outpaced the broader market across the two years, with the Magnificent Seven together climbing over 75% in 2023 versus 24% for the index as a whole. Post-COVID travel demand also drove a strong recovery in cruise and leisure names.
Small-caps and most "ordinary" companies outside the AI theme delivered far more modest returns, and some Magnificent Seven members — Tesla and Apple among them — had periods of sharp underperformance even within their own group.
Then, on 5–6 November 2024, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Markets reacted immediately and decisively: the Dow Jones had its best single day in two years, gaining more than 1,500 points, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closed at record highs the day after the result. Banks (on hopes of deregulation), small-cap companies, and cryptocurrency all rallied hard, and Tesla jumped over 12% on the prospect of Elon Musk taking a formal role in the new administration. Renewable energy shares were among the few to fall on the news, on expectations of a less favourable policy environment.
"Liberation Day": the tariff shock
The post-election rally didn't last unchallenged. Trade policy under the new administration started weighing on sentiment as early as February 2025, with tariffs announced on goods from China, Canada and Mexico. The real shock came on 2 April 2025 — dubbed "Liberation Day" — when a far more sweeping set of global tariffs was announced than markets had priced in.
The reaction was brutal and fast. The S&P 500 fell almost 5% on 3 April, its worst single day since the COVID crash, then fell another 6% the next day as China retaliated. Over four trading days the index lost around 12% and more than $6 trillion in market value evaporated globally — one of the sharpest short-term sell-offs since the Second World War.
The sell-off was unusually indiscriminate, dragging down almost every S&P 500 constituent. Companies with heavy exposure to Chinese manufacturing and imports, and automakers facing new tariffs on foreign-built vehicles, were singled out for some of the sharpest declines.
As aggressive tariffs were subsequently paused or renegotiated, the market clawed back the entire "Liberation Day" decline within roughly a month — one of the fastest full recoveries from a sell-off of that size in market history.
Israel strikes Iran: the first shock
On 13 June 2025, Israel launched direct strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets, and Iran retaliated — the start of what came to be called the "12-Day War." Oil jumped roughly 7–8% in a single session, its sharpest one-day move in years, and safe-haven assets (gold, the U.S. dollar, the yen, government bonds) all rallied. U.S. equities fell, but relatively modestly — the Dow lost about 1.8%, the S&P 500 around 1.1%.
Markets recovered within weeks and resumed climbing. By the end of 2025, the S&P 500 had delivered its third consecutive year of double-digit gains — up 16.4% for the year, its third straight double-digit annual advance, despite the spring tariff shock and the June conflict.
The 2026 Iran war: a far larger escalation
The uneasy calm didn't last. On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran — a far larger escalation than the previous year's strikes, resulting in the death of Iran's Supreme Leader and a rapid slide into open conflict. Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel, briefly touching the $110 mark as Brent crude posted its sharpest single-day jumps since 2022, and by early March the Strait of Hormuz had effectively frozen as a transit route, halting a significant share of the world's seaborne oil and gas shipments. Cryptocurrency markets, which trade around the clock, saw a sharp flash crash over the opening weekend, and equity markets were expected to open sharply lower as the news broke.
Airlines and other heavy fuel-consumers, along with shares sensitive to global growth and shipping disruption, bore the brunt of the initial shock. Growth and AI-linked names — which had led the market for three years running — also sold off sharply in the broad "risk-off" move.
Gold, government bonds and the U.S. dollar all strengthened, as they typically do in a geopolitical shock. Energy producers benefited from the sustained rise in oil prices, though a lack of spare refining capacity meant some of the largest oil majors didn't capture the full upside.
A ceasefire attempt in early April 2026 failed to fully resolve the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, keeping a persistent risk premium in oil and broader markets through the following months.
Where things stand now
True to form, markets absorbed the shock and moved on. Through the middle of 2026, the S&P 500 climbed back to new records, powered once more by artificial intelligence-linked earnings growth, with Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia doing much of the heavy lifting.
By mid-August 2026, the S&P 500 had closed above 7,800 for the first time in history — roughly 20% higher than a year earlier and up close to 14% for the year, having briefly dipped below 6,400 during the worst of the war scare in the spring. In the most recent trading sessions, Amazon jumped more than 15% in a single day on stronger-than-expected cloud computing results, with Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta also gaining on continued AI optimism. On the other side of the ledger, Apple has lagged on chip supply constraints raising costs and limiting production, while Boeing, UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil (held back by limited refining capacity despite elevated oil prices) have been among the recent laggards.
What this actually looked like for a South African investor
Everything above is told in dollars, because that's the world's reserve currency and the benchmark most global funds are measured against. But if your money sits in a rand-denominated unit trust, retirement annuity or TFSA with offshore exposure, two things have been happening to your returns at once: what the underlying shares did, and what the rand did against the dollar while you held them.
South African equities haven't been a consolation prize. The FTSE/JSE Top 40 gained 47.7% in 2025 alone (total return, including dividends), close to triple the S&P 500's 16%, and the All Share index crossed 100,000 points for the first time in its 65-year history before pushing on to fresh records in 2026. An investor with a purely offshore mindset over the past two years would have missed one of the best runs the local market has had in decades.
The rand blew out to some of its weakest levels on record during the COVID panic in 2020, as capital fled emerging markets for safety. It weakened again through 2022's rate-hiking cycle and sat above R18 to the dollar for parts of 2025. It has since strengthened to around R16, which means dollar gains made earlier in this timeline have been worth somewhat less in rand terms by the time they're converted back — a reminder that currency moves can add to or quietly erode offshore returns independently of what the underlying shares actually did.
Neither market "wins" outright, and that's the point. A portfolio split between local and global exposure — within the usual retirement fund limits — isn't a hedge against picking the wrong market. It's a hedge against not knowing in advance which currency and which index will carry your returns in any given year, which over the past five years has flipped more than once.
What five and a half years of shocks actually teach you
Lay all of this side by side and a few patterns become impossible to ignore:
COVID, the 2022 bear market, the 2025 tariff shock, and two separate Iran-related conflicts each caused sharp, frightening drops — and in every case, markets recovered all of the lost ground, usually faster than most people expected at the time.
Energy was dead money in the 2020 recovery and the standout winner in 2022. Technology was the worst-performing sector in 2022 and has driven almost every point of index gain since. Chasing whatever performed best last year is a reliable way to buy in at the wrong time.
A large share of the market's best individual trading days occur during bear markets or in the first weeks of a new recovery. Stepping out of the market during the scary part of the cycle risks missing the best part of it too.
Ukraine, two rounds of conflict involving Iran, and a tariff shock all caused sharp, short-term drops. In each case, the equity market's reaction was driven less by the headlines themselves and more by whether the shock threatened an actual, ongoing disruption to supply, trade or growth.
A handful of mega-cap technology names have driven a disproportionate share of index returns since 2023. That's been a powerful tailwind — but it also means the market's fortunes are more tied to a small number of companies' earnings than headline index returns might suggest.
None of this tells you what will happen next. It does tell you that reacting to the crisis of the moment — selling because of a war, a tariff announcement, or an election result — has, time and again, been the wrong instinct.
How much of this risk you should be carrying, and how your own portfolio should be positioned through cycles like these, depends entirely on your personal circumstances, time horizon and goals — not on what the headlines are doing this week. That's a conversation worth having with an adviser rather than a decision to make in isolation.
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