The term dead cat bounce may sound like something from a grim meme page, but its roots lie deep in financial journalism and trading floor slang. According to most sources, it was coined in 1985 by two Financial Times journalists — Horace Brag and Wang Ke Shing — while covering a sharp but short-lived rebound in the Singapore and Malaysian stock markets after a brutal sell-off. The rebound had sparked hope, but soon collapsed again. “Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height,” one of them quipped — and a legendary metaphor was born.
Before the phrase entered the mainstream, floor traders on Wall Street and in London used blunter terms like sucker rally, bull trap, or technical bounce. But none carried the same visceral imagery — or morbid humor — as a lifeless cat hitting pavement. Traders, always keen on vivid lingo, adopted it quickly.
The first historical bounce often retroactively labeled as such was during the Great Depression. After the infamous 1929 crash, the Dow Jones rebounded by over 18% in late November — only to continue its descent into multi-year lows. At the time, there was no dead cat metaphor — but in hindsight, it fits perfectly.
In 1987, after Black Monday, when the Dow lost over 22% in a single day, markets staged a seemingly hopeful recovery. But it soon turned out to be another bounce in a longer downtrend. The phrase dead cat bounce started gaining traction on trading desks and in financial columns during this period — becoming embedded in Wall Street vernacular.
The dot-com bubble in the early 2000s offered multiple textbook cases. After the Nasdaq collapsed from its March 2000 peak, it experienced several sharp upward moves — +10%, +20%, even +40% — all of which ultimately gave way to deeper losses by 2002. Tech stocks were the cats; the bounces were their last twitches.
Another striking episode came from China’s stock market in 2015. After a meteoric bull run, the Shanghai Composite plunged nearly 30% in a matter of weeks. Authorities intervened, and a temporary rebound followed — only to unravel again. Analysts worldwide flagged it as a classic dead cat bounce: policy-induced, emotion-driven, and ultimately doomed.
Enter crypto. In 2018, after Bitcoin’s euphoric rise to nearly $20,000, its descent was marked by a series of recoveries — to $11k, then $8k — each hailed as the comeback. Each failed. The dead cat had arrived in crypto, and it was bouncing like mad.
The trend repeated during the LUNA/UST collapse in 2022. The token saw bizarre mini-recoveries — +600%, +900% in intraday spikes — as speculators rushed to catch a falling knife. But the system was broken, and each bounce was just a death spasm. Similar micro-bounces occurred after the FTX crash, the NFT winter, and even the altcoin culls of 2023.
Today, dead cat bounce lives on in three forms:
As trader slang, used with knowing irony;
As a technical term, describing failed reversals in bear markets;
And as internet culture, where it’s been memeified into charts, gifs, and crypto shitposting.
It’s more than a chart pattern — it’s a psychological lesson. It reminds us that hope is often premature, momentum is cruel, and markets don’t care what we wish to believe. Even a dead cat, after all, may bounce — but it doesn’t come back to life.
