The Crypto Fear & Greed Index

What the gauge on the overview measures, where it comes from and how much it can tell you.

The overview page shows a semicircular gauge labelled Crypto Fear & Greed, with a number from 0 to 100 and a word such as "Fear" or "Greed". It is one of the most widely quoted sentiment readings in crypto. It is also easy to over-read, so here is what it is and is not.

Where it comes from

The index is published once a day by alternative.me, an independent site. Market Check does not calculate it; we fetch the published value, along with the readings from yesterday, a week ago and a month ago, and show them as they are. Because the publisher updates it daily, the number on the gauge changes once a day even though we check for it more often.

What goes into it

According to its publisher, the index is a weighted blend of several signals about the bitcoin market, including:

Volatility: unusually large price swings are read as fear.
Market momentum and volume: strong buying on high volume is read as greed.
Social media activity: how much, and how quickly, people are posting about bitcoin.
Dominance: bitcoin's share of the whole crypto market. A rising share is read as money retreating to the largest coin, which is a fearful move.
Search trends: what people are searching for about bitcoin.

The publisher has changed the inputs and weights over time, and some (such as surveys) have been paused. Treat the description as a summary, not an exact recipe.

How to read the number

Roughly, readings near 0 are labelled extreme fear, around the middle neutral, and near 100 extreme greed. The trend is often more informative than the level: a move from 70 to 40 in a week says more about a change in mood than a single reading of 40.

The idea behind indexes like this is a contrarian one: crowds tend to be most fearful near lows and most greedy near highs. Sometimes that holds. Often it does not, at least not on any timetable you could act on. Markets can stay at "extreme greed" for weeks while prices keep rising, or at "extreme fear" while they keep falling.

Limits worth knowing

It is about bitcoin. Most inputs are bitcoin-specific. The mood around a small token can be completely different.
It is built from price. Volatility and momentum are themselves derived from recent price moves, so the index partly restates what the chart already shows.
It is not a forecast. It describes sentiment today. It does not predict the price tomorrow, and it is not a signal to buy or sell.
It is not about stocks. There are separate sentiment measures for equities, such as the VIX volatility index, which measures how much movement options traders expect in the S&P 500 over the next month.

A sensible way to use it

Use it as one line of context next to prices and news: a quick answer to "is the crypto market jittery or euphoric at the moment?". If it moves sharply, open the heat map and the crypto headlines to see what changed. Nothing on this page is financial advice.