Shares of Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) trade near $63 as I write. That puts the stock about 53% below its $133.91 closing high from June 30, 2025 (adjusted for the streaming giant’s 10-for-1 stock split last November).
The stock first closed more than 50% below that peak on Oct. 21, the day after the company’s third-quarter results.
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And it’s not the first time. Using split-adjusted daily closes since Netflix’s 2002 IPO, I find five earlier times shares closed at half a record or less — in 2002, 2004, 2008, 2011, and 2022.
What came next depended a lot on how long investors hung on. A year after crossing the 50% mark, the stock was higher just twice.
But three years on, it was up four times out of five, and three of those gains cleared 200%.
Image source: Netflix.
Three years beat one
The two quick winners came first. After crossing the line on Oct. 2, 2002, Netflix stock climbed 406% in the next year. After its Oct. 24, 2008, crossing, it rose 191% in a year. Both runs kept going, too, with the stock up 558% and 527%, respectively, three years after each crossing.
The other three began badly. Netflix stock was down 0.3% a year after its July 26, 2004, crossing, down 60% a year after Sept. 19, 2011, and down 9% a year after March 8, 2022.
Patience paid off in two of them. Three years on, the 2011 and 2022 crossings showed gains of 218% and 154%, respectively. Of course, the 2004 drop never made it, and the stock was still down 6% three years later.
In other words, the median return for someone buying at the halfway mark was about flat after one year and a 218% gain after three.
Was the halfway mark ever the bottom?
Rarely. In four of the five cases, Netflix kept dropping by at least another third after it crossed 50%. Shares shed another 63% after the 2011 crossing, bottoming in September 2012, and another 51% after the 2022 crossing, bottoming that May.
Only in 2008 did the stock bottom nearly right away, with its lowest close coming three days later, around 5% under the crossing.
The two quickest rebounds also happened in marketwide crashes. When Netflix crossed the 50% mark in October 2002 and October 2008, the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) was around 46% and 44% under its record close, respectively. Put simply, stocks across the market had already fallen hard, and Netflix rebounded with them.
