Fear & Greed Index

The Fear & Greed Index compresses the crypto market’s emotional state into one daily scalar between 0 and 100. The chart plots that scalar against the four regime cuts the index has used since launch: below 25 is Extreme fear; 25 to 50 is Fear; 50 to 75 is Greed; above 75 is Extreme greed. The four background bands map to those regimes, and the muted line is Bitcoin’s USD price on the log left axis, there only to put each sentiment swing in cycle context.

The series carries 3,035 daily prints from 01 Feb 2018 through 15 Jun 2026. It is a derived measure of how the crowd feels, assembled from six market and attention signals — not a measure of what Bitcoin is worth. That distinction is the whole point: it tells you the emotional regime, and the regime is what most other indicators leave you to infer.

Six components combine with fixed weights into the daily 0–100 value. Each sub-score is normalised to its own 0–100 range first, then weighted into the composite. The weights have not changed since the first print on 1 February 2018; the survey leg is the one moving part, currently paused, with the remaining components reweighted to fill the gap.

The composition is the reason the index lags. Volatility, momentum/volume, and dominance — 60% of the weight when surveys are paused — are computed directly from recent price and volume. The social and trends legs move with attention, which itself tracks the tape: people search “bitcoin crash” after the crash, not before. Only the survey component was structurally independent, and it is currently switched off.

The structural consequence is unavoidable: the index will move with price far more often than it moves before price. That is not a flaw in the data — it is what the index is. Read it as a mirror that confirms the regime you are already in, not a window onto the next one.

Reading the index at each cycle anchor surfaces the regime-shift pattern. The 2021 cycle-top window printed sustained Extreme Greed for weeks around both peaks; the 2022 stress window dragged the reading into single digits twice; the 2024 pre-halving high reached 90 in early March. Prices are our own daily closes; the regime label is the canonical 0–25–50–75 split.

This is the page’s distinctive read, and the part most competitor pages omit. For every daily print of Extreme Fear (≤25) and Extreme Greed (≥75) since the series began, the median 30, 90, and 180-day forward BTC return is computed against our own daily-close series. Without the sample size, “buy fear, sell greed” is a slogan; with it, the return distribution is a number you can read off and argue with.

“Buy fear” does not hold cleanly at the 90-day horizon. The median forward 90-day return from an Extreme Fear print since 2018 is −5.5% in this dataset — the 30- and 180-day medians lean mildly positive, but the 90-day window does not. Individual prints during the November 2022 post-FTX week were followed by months of further drawdown before the recovery began in earnest. The slogan is real as a regime read; as a fixed-horizon edge it is far weaker than the bumper-sticker version, and the tail is where accounts get liquidated.

“Sell greed” is the weaker half of the slogan in this record. Across the Extreme Greed prints the median forward 90-day return is +10.7% — positive, and ahead of the Extreme Fear cluster at the same horizon. Extreme Greed regimes can persist before any topping inflection — spring 2021 spent much of February through April in or near Extreme Greed, the late-2021 cycle top printed repeated Extreme Greed days, and the March 2024 pre-halving high spent over a fortnight above 80. A practitioner test of the index found the strategy “was only profitable with proper trade management by slowly scaling in and out over macrocycles.” Conditions can stay irrationally fearful or greedy for months.

Counting by day over-weights the long stretches. The cluster table treats every daily Extreme print as one observation, so a four-month run of unbroken Extreme Fear counts ~120 times. An alternative cut grouped by regime episode rather than by day would yield a far smaller sample with similar median direction. The single-day formulation is the simplest reproducible one; read the medians as direction, not as a tradeable edge per print.

It is a mirror of price, so it cannot call the bottom. Five of six components are price-derivative and the one independent input — the survey — is paused. The canonical failure is the November 2022 post-FTX window: the index sat in single digits for weeks before the cycle low actually printed on 21 November 2022, and it had already printed a 6 back in June 2022, five months too early. Anyone who treated the first Extreme Fear print as “the bottom” bought a long way above it.

Extreme Greed is not a top. The index reached 90 in March 2024, weeks before BTC’s actual March-2024 high, then again well ahead of subsequent highs; in spring 2021 it spent much of February through April in or near Extreme Greed — choppy rather than an unbroken hold above 75, with sub-75 prints in between — right into the April peak. Selling the first Extreme Greed print routinely means selling into more upside. The regime can persist far longer than a position’s patience.

The single-day print whips on event noise. A liquidity flush, an ETF headline, or a macro print can move the value 20 points in a day and retrace it the next session. The June-2019 spike to 95 — the highest reading on record, set on 26 June 2019 during a sharp but short-lived rally — reversed inside weeks. The 30-day average is the regime read; the one-day number is a headline.

The composite hides component disagreement. Rising volatility with falling volume, or rising dominance with falling momentum, both collapse into a single value that obscures the split. A reading of 47 can be assembled from very different underlying states. Reading the index without checking the legs is reading the summary statistic without checking the distribution.

The daily contributions are not published. The weights are public, but the per-component daily breakouts are not. A reader auditing why a given day printed 47 rather than 53 cannot reproduce the calculation from the public methodology alone — so the index has to be taken partly on trust, which is a poor footing for a number people trade on.

If you accumulate on a schedule, Extreme Fear earns a small tactical accelerator role — the median forward return leans mildly positive at 30 and 180 days, though it is −5.5% at the 90-day mark in this record — so treat it as confirmation that the regime is fearful, not that the bottom is in. The November 2022 window had months of single-digit prints before the recovery, and 2018 bottomed on a similar arc. Add to your regular cadence on Extreme Fear; do not switch from cadence to a single lump-sum on one print.

If you are timing the cycle, watch the 30-day average, not the headline. The average crossing back up through 50 from below has historically marked the start of multi-month recoveries; crossing 75 from above has marked late-cycle distribution windows. Cross-check with MVRV-Z for a valuation read independent of sentiment and realised volatility for the largest single input. The index alone is slow, and the extremes lie at the turns far more often than they confirm them in the middle.