How we work: sources, figures and what we will not do

Education only, not financial advice. Figures come from official sources, each with its date; past market moves do not predict future ones. How we work

Where the figures come from

We use official statistics and primary documents first: the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED database (which republishes data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Reserve and index providers), the National Bureau of Economic Research for US recession dates, the Federal Reserve's history essays and reports, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for market events, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report for 2008, and the Office for National Statistics and the Bank of England for the UK. We read encyclopedias and news archives to find primary sources, and cite them only where no official source covers a historical point.

Each page lists its sources at the bottom with the date we accessed them. If a number appears in the text and we could not trace it to a source we opened, it does not go on the page.

How we compute the numbers in the charts and case files

For the charts and the depth register we download the official files directly (the CSV files behind FRED series such as SP500, NASDAQCOM, CPIAUCSL, UNRATE and T10Y2Y, the ONS series D7G7, the Bank of England series IUDBEDR and the New York Fed's supply chain index). A short script then reads them and computes peaks, troughs, percentage falls and year-on-year changes. Nobody types the chart values by hand.

A peak-to-trough fall is measured on daily closing prices: the highest close before the fall and the lowest close after it. A "recovery" date is the first close above the old peak. These are price indexes without dividends, so they understate what an investor who reinvested dividends would have experienced; we say which index each figure refers to.

Some facts we cannot compute from public files. FRED only carries the last ten years of the S&P 500 and the Dow, for instance, so older index levels come from Federal Reserve or other primary publications, and the page says which.

What we will not do

• Give investment, tax or financial advice, or tell readers to buy, sell or hold anything.
• Predict crashes, recessions or market levels. Pages describe the record and the official definitions; the present is described with the latest official reading and its date.
• Publish medical or health information. The pandemic appears on this site only as an economic event.
• Invent people, quotes, surveys or reader stories.
• Present ourselves as, or imitate, any government body, central bank, exchange, index provider or news outlet. We are an independent site.

If you are deciding what to do with your own money, the regulators' education pages are a sound place to start: Investor.gov from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and MoneyHelper in the UK.

How often we check

All figures were checked on the date shown on each page. Historical facts do not change, but the "where things stand" numbers (inflation, unemployment, interest rates) do, so we refresh the data files and rebuild the site when new official releases come out, and the update date on the page changes when we do.

Who publishes the site and how it is funded

coronavirus.markets is published by Aigen Digital Marketing SL, a company based in León, Spain. It has no connection with the previous owners of this domain name, whose pages are no longer online.

The site is funded by advertising. We are applying to Google AdSense; once ads run, they will appear in marked spaces and will not change what we write. No company pays to be mentioned, and we hold no positions or commercial relationships with any of the institutions or indexes we write about. Details are in the legal notice.

To find your way around, the history of stock market crashes is the best starting point, and the 2020 crash case file shows how a page is built.

Questions readers ask