Somebody at CNBC has decided to hype the fact that Apple’s (AAPL) $8.81 drop today is the worst one-day decline since autumn 2000. I guess that’s true if you’re looking at points but I’d argue that you should look at percentages. Alternatively, one could look at market cap. Based on that measure they certainly did lose a lot of capitalization today — about $7 billion. But even using market cap isn’t really a fair comparison since Apple Inc. is so much bigger than it’s ever been. Most normal fluctuations these days are going to be bigger moves than in years past.

For my money, I’ll stick with doing percentage based comparisons. As I’ve said many a time, percentages are the way to go if you want to make fair and reasonable comparisons. The simple point comparisons make good headlines for mainstream media when they write things like “Dow Makes Quickest Ever 1,000 Point Move” or “Biggest One-Day Decline in Apple in 7 Years” but beyond that, they’re pointless. Just by eyeballing Apple’s chart I noticed several declines which were larger than today’s:

  • -17.13% on July 18, 2001
  • -15% on June 19, 2002
  • -12.43% on July 17, 2002
  • -9.21% on April 14, 2005
  • -7.08% on November 7, 2002
  • -6.33% on February 6, 2006
  • -6.29% on October 16, 2003
  • -6.19% on January 18, 2007

Today’s $8.81 drop was only a 6.13% loss. To me, losing 15% or even 6.19% of my money is worse than losing 6.13% of my money but that’s just me.