The ‘COVID’ crash of the 2020 U.S. Stock market

• The 2020 U.S. stock market crash stems from its own systemic instability. COVID-19 merely served as the spark of crash. Bubble for stocks with different cap levels have distinct temporal profiles. Stock sectors middle and small suffer greater losses. We employed log-periodic power law singularity (LPPLS) methodology to systematically investigate in equities total capitalizations through four major indexes, including Wilshire 5000 Total Market index, S&P 500 MidCap 400 Russell 2000 representing overall, large capitalization stocks, respectively. During crash, all indexes lost more than a third their values within five weeks, while both suffered much losses overall. Our results indicate that price trajectories these prior clearly featured obvious LPPLS bubble pattern were indeed positive regime. Contrary popular belief US was mainly due pandemic, we shown COVID sparks had stemmed increasingly instability itself. also performed complementary post-mortem analysis analyses probability density distributions critical time are positively skewed; originated begun form early September 2018; profiles patterns. This study not only sheds new light on makings but creates novel pipeline future real-time detection mechanism dissection any financial and/or economic index.