Dot-com bust, 1987 crash had massive relief rallies similar to Wednesday’s pop
The Nasdaq Marketsite is seen during morning trading on April 7, 2025 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Every bear market has days like this.
The Nasdaq soared 12% on Wednesday, the second-best day on record for the tech-heavy index and its sharpest rally since January 2001, which was the middle of the dot-com crash.
During the financial crisis in October 2008, the Nasdaq enjoyed two of its best five days ever. The other two came as the tech bubble was bursting. The index’s sixth-best day since its beginning in 1971 came on March 13, 2020, as the Covid pandemic was hitting the U.S.
Of the 25 best days for the Nasdaq, including Wednesday, 22 took place during the dot-com collapse, the 2008-09 financial crisis or the early days of Covid. One occurred on Oct. 21, 1987, two days after Black Monday. The other was in November 2022.
Call it a dead-cat bounce, a relief rally or short covering. It’s a familiar reaction during the worst of times for Wall Street.
Be prepared for plenty more volatility.
The worst month on record for the Nasdaq was October 1987, when the index plunged 27%. Second to that was a 23% drop in November 2000. In March 2020, the Nasdaq sank 10%. It’s still down 1% this month just after closing out its worst quarter since 2022.
President Donald Trump sparked the Wednesday bounce when he dropped new tariff rates on imports from most U.S. trade partners to 10% for 90 days to allow trade negotiations with those countries. The president’s social media post lifted optimism that levies would be less severe than expected and immediately boosted a market that’s been hammered since Trump rolled out his sweeping tariff plan last week.
Wealthy Trump donors and business leaders, including hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone and billionaire investor Leon Cooperman have weighed in with hefty criticism of Trump’s tariffs. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier on Wednesday that the tariffs will likely lead to a recession, after BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Monday at an event in New York that, “Most CEOs I talk to would say we are probably in a recession right now.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attends a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and one of Trump’s closest confidantes in the White House, spent the early part of this week slamming Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade advisor, calling him a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
Musk’s electric vehicle company has gotten pummeled of late, tumbling 22% in the four prior trading sessions after suffering its worst quarter since 2022. The stock soared 23% on Wednesday, its second-best day on record.
The big difference between the current market tumult and the downturns in 1987, 2000-2001, 2008 and 2020 is that many investors say this one was easily avoidable and, potentially, can be reversed based on what the president decides to do.
“What Trump unveiled Wednesday is stupid, wrong, arrogantly extreme, ignorant trade-wise and addressing a non-problem with misguided tools,” investor Ken Fisher wrote in a post on X on Monday, referring to last week’s announcement. “Yet, as near as I can tell it will fade and fail and the fear is bigger than the problem, which from here is bullish.”
Trying to predict Trump’s next move is a fool’s errand.
On Sunday evening the president told reporters that he’s not trying to push the market down, “but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.” He stressed the importance of fixing the country’s trade deficit with China, and said “unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.”
The president is keeping his hard line on China, at least for now. He said on Wednesday that he was raising the tariff on China higher, to 125%. All other countries would go back to the 10% baseline tariff rate as negotiations take place.
Prior to his latest pronouncement, economic fears had spilled into the bond market, raising concerns that higher interest rates would create further problems for consumers at the worst possible time. The 10-year Treasury note yield, which helps decide rates on mortgages, credit card debt and auto loans, spiked overnight to 4.51% after hitting 3.9% last week. It’s currently at 4.38%.
As the tech industry’s megacap companies, which make up an outsized portion of the Nasdaq and the S&P 500, prepare to report quarterly results starting late this month, management teams will be looking for some visibility that can guide forecasts for the rest of the year and into 2026.
In the absence of more clarity, many of their plans will likely be on hold as they figure out how much existing and expected tariffs will raise costs and hurt revenue, and what they need to do to shore up supply chains.
Wednesday provided some relief. Investors like Ackman are celebrating.
“This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump,” Ackman wrote on X. “Textbook, Art of the Deal.”
In a note, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called it “the news we and everyone on the Street was waiting for” after the president’s “self-inflicted Armageddon.”
But for companies that are in the crosshairs of Trump’s wavering policy decisions, all the uncertainty remains.
WATCH: Trump’s 90-day pause
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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