Fear & Greed

Data to 2026-09-20. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

A sentiment index from 0 (extreme fear) to 100 (extreme greed). It is conventionally read as a contrarian indicator: extreme fear has often accompanied good entry points, extreme greed the opposite. Its value is in the extremes; readings in the middle say very little.

How it's calculated

A composite of volatility, market momentum, social media activity, market dominance and search trends, normalised to a 0–100 scale.

What it did in past cycles

The series starts 2018-02-01. Its all-time low of 5 has been printed on 2019-08-22, with Bitcoin at $10,120, and again on 2026-02-12 at $66,222. Its all-time high of 95 came on 2019-06-26 at $12,863, and repeatedly through December 2020 at around $19,000.

Neither extreme marked a turn. The 95 readings of December 2020 were followed by price more than tripling to the April 2021 high and then peaking again in November — eleven months and 3.5× later. Someone selling on 'extreme greed' in December 2020 would have missed the entire remainder of the cycle. The 95 in June 2019 preceded a two-year period in which price went nowhere and then fell.

At the anchors it read 11 (2018-12-15), 75 (2021-11-08), 29 (2022-11-09), 71 (2025-10-06) and 15 (2026-06-30). Those are directionally sensible — fear at bottoms, greed at tops — which is exactly what you would expect from an index computed largely from price.

What it doesn't tell you

It is a measure of sentiment, not value, and it is largely derived from price — so it partly restates what the chart already shows. The component weightings are set by the index provider and are not something you can inspect or verify.

Its own record is the strongest argument against using it mechanically. Both all-time extremes landed nowhere near a cycle turn, and the index only begins in February 2018, so it has never observed a full cycle top-to-top before 2021.

Reading it with other metrics

Treat this as one input among several and never as a trigger. Funding rate is the harder-nosed sentiment measure: it costs traders real money to be positioned, so it reflects conviction rather than commentary.

For a positioning signal grounded in behaviour rather than mood, Long-Term SOPR and long-term-holder supply record what people did rather than what a survey says they felt.