Fear & Greed Index
The full price history, painted by each day's crypto Fear & Greed reading.
Understanding this chart
The Fear & Greed Index (published daily by alternative.me since 2018) blends volatility, momentum, social media activity, dominance, and survey data into a 0–100 sentiment score: 0 is extreme fear, 100 is extreme greed. Here it's painted onto the price line — red stretches are fearful markets, green stretches greedy ones.
The contrarian reading is the useful one: extreme fear has historically clustered near local and cycle bottoms (when buying felt impossible), and extreme greed near tops. It agrees with the risk metric surprisingly often despite measuring completely different inputs — sentiment versus valuation.
Grey price history before February 2018 predates the index. Sentiment is fast and noisy — treat single-day readings as weather, multi-week extremes as climate.