Treasury Bond (TLT) Historical Drawdowns

Every Major TLT Drawdown Since 2008

TLT's single deepest and longest drawdown — the still-open decline that began in August 2020 and reached -48.35% on October 19, 2023 — is not included as a row below because it has not yet recovered to a new high. It is covered in the "Where is TLT right now?" section above and in the Key Observations below. The table covers every completed (fully recovered) TLT drawdown of 10% or more from a prior high since 2012, the earliest point with reliable daily price data on this site. TLT also had a roughly 26.6% decline from a December 2008 high that fully recovered by August 2011 as post-crisis Treasury yields normalized, but a precise trough date for that event predates this site's retained daily price history and is omitted from the table for that reason.

Conventions: Depth is the peak-to-trough decline on closing prices of TLT (iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF), computed directly from this site's own daily price history since 2011. Duration is the number of calendar days from the peak to the trough. Recovery is measured from the trough until TLT closed above the prior peak again (not from the peak). Severity scores are retroactive estimates using DrawdownAlerts' methodology and are not directly comparable across eras or assets, because each asset's historical baseline evolves over time.

TLT launched in July 2002. Dates before 2012 are approximate; the site's retained daily price history for build-time calculations begins in 2011, so events starting before then (such as the 2008-2011 post-crisis Treasury selloff mentioned above) cannot be broken out into a precise trough date and are described narratively instead of tabulated.

Key Observations

• -TLT is currently in the deepest and longest drawdown in its history. The fund peaked on August 4, 2020 and fell as much as 48.35% to an October 19, 2023 trough as the Fed raised rates at the fastest pace in roughly 40 years. It has not closed at a new all-time high since, meaning this drawdown has already run more than five years — longer than the roughly 2.5-year recovery from the 2016-2019 Fed hiking cycle, the longest previously recorded.
• -TLT's drawdowns are shaped differently than stock-market crashes. There is no single-month event in this dataset comparable to Black Monday or the COVID crash for equities. Instead, TLT's worst declines are grinding, multi-year moves tied to interest-rate cycles — the fund actually rose sharply during the acute phase of the 2008 financial crisis as investors fled to safety, then gave back those gains as yields normalized afterward.
• -The 2013 taper tantrum was a preview at smaller scale. A 20.7% decline over about 13 months after the Fed signaled it would slow its bond purchases showed the same rate-sensitivity dynamic behind the much larger 2020-present decline, just without the sustained multi-year rate hikes that followed in 2022-2023.
• -Recoveries have historically taken far longer than the declines themselves. In every completed event in this dataset, the recovery from trough to new high took multiple times longer than the initial decline to the trough — for example the 2016-2019 event fell for about 156 days but took roughly 2.5 years to recover, a pattern that helps explain why the current decline, if it follows a similar shape, could remain open for some time after any eventual trough.

How to Read This Table

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Resources