Fear & Greed history

The chart has two views, switched above the plot. Index draws the Crypto Fear & Greed Index itself, one reading a day since February 2018, from 0 at the bottom to 100 at the top. The line is coloured by the reading: red for fear, grey around the middle, green for greed. Perly names the readings as the chart's hover does: 25 and under extreme fear, up to 46 fear, 47 to 53 neutral, up to 74 greed, and 75 and over extreme greed.

Price draws bitcoin's price over the same days, painted with each day's reading, so the shape is what the market did and the colour is how it felt while doing it. There the bar on the right is a key to the colour rather than an axis. Each reading is paired with the close of the day before it, because a reading is published as its day begins, before that day's price is made.

The chips cut the chart to the last one, two, four or eight years. Hovering shows each day's reading and its mood, and in the price view the price beside them.

The index is made and published by alternative.me, which combines several measures of the market into one number a day: by its own description, bitcoin's volatility, its momentum and trading volume, social media, bitcoin's dominance of the market and search trends. Perly draws the published readings as they are, and adds only the colour and the pairing with the price.

Readings in the single digits and in the nineties are rare, and the table shows when they happened. The index moves quickly — it can cross from fear to greed within weeks — so one day's reading says less than a run of them. Extremes have often come near turning points, but the index measures a mood, and a mood can stay extreme for weeks.

The index describes how the market felt; it does not forecast what the price will do, and a reading of fear or greed is not a reason to buy or sell. It is one party's gauge of the mood around bitcoin, built from the sources it chose.