The index everyone quotes, drawn against our own price — and the one measurement that says what it is actually made of: it follows the month that has already happened.
68 the index on Oct-22 2026, the last day in this build, read from a public record, published by askthetape.com.
The index read 68 on 2026-10-22 — their word for it is «Greed». It runs 0 to 100 and it is the single most quoted number in crypto after the price. We did not build it and we cannot rebuild it: the weights behind it are the publisher's. What we CAN do is measure what it tracks, and that is the point of this page. 🩸 Against the bitcoin move of the PREVIOUS thirty days the index correlates +0.697. Against the NEXT thirty days, +0.130. Over 3,182 days. So it is a very good description of the month that already happened and close to nothing about the month ahead — which is worth knowing before reading it as advice. The bar views are the honest version of «extremes»: every time the index closed at 10 or under after at least thirty quiet days (11 episodes since 2018-02-01, years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2025, 2026), and what the price did 30 and 90 days later. Median -2.4% at thirty days, 3 of 11 positive; +13.4% at ninety. An ordinary day on this page is followed by +1.5% over thirty days and +3.2% over ninety, so the fear episodes were BELOW the ordinary day at one month and above it at three. Read the bars, not the headline: 11 episodes is a small pile, they are not independent draws, and a bar too young to be scored is drawn hollow. The other end is thinner still. We found 4 episodes at 90 or over since 2018-02-01, counting a new episode only after at least thirty quiet days. They fell in 2019, 2020, 2024. The index's own low is 5 (2019-08-22, 2026-02-12, 2026-02-23) and its high 95 (2019-06-26, 2020-12-01, 2020-12-06).
| leg | the Fear & Greed index (a third party's number), whole history in one public request (no key), 3,182 daily readings from 2018-02-01 — × our own Bitstamp daily closes for everything the bars measure. The publisher names its ingredients (volatility, momentum and volume, social posts, dominance, search trends) but not the weights, so the number itself cannot be rebuilt from our data. |
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| cadence | daily, all seven days; the running UTC day is cut out of the line: Free sees a dashed outline, its reading so far is on Tape |
| since | 2018-02-01 — the publisher's first reading |
| 🩸 it looks backwards | correlation with the bitcoin move of the previous 30 days +0.70; with the next 30 days +0.13; 3,182 days. A reading is mostly a summary of the month you just lived through. |
| 🩸 where it is thinner | we do not own this number. The publisher can change its weights without telling anyone and the history would change shape with no seam we could see; the series also has 2 gaps of its own (widest 4 days), which is why the line breaks rather than being filled in. The labels are the publisher's too, measured on this pull: Extreme Fear 5–25 (739 days) · Fear 26–46 (909 days) · Neutral 47–54 (403 days) · Greed 55–75 (849 days) · Extreme Greed 76–95 (282 days). |
| episode rule | an episode is the FIRST day the index closes at or beyond the threshold after at least 30 days without one, so a long stretch of fear counts once instead of ninety times. Thresholds are OURS, not the publisher's labels: 10 or under (11 episodes, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2025, 2026) and 90 or over (4 episodes, 2019, 2020, 2024). Forward returns are close-to-close on our bitcoin leg, 30 and 90 calendar days out; an episode younger than its horizon is drawn hollow and is not scored. |
| 🩸 the distribution, not the verdict | fear at 10 or under: median -2.4% at 30 days (3 of 11 positive, worst -13.4%, best +22.9%), +13.4% at 90 days (8 of 11). Greed at 90 or over: +12.8% at 30 days (3 of 4), +8.2% at 90 days (3 of 4). Every-day baseline on the same window: +1.5% at 30 days (54% positive), +3.2% at 90 days (54% positive). 11 and 4 episodes — one 2020 or one 2022 moves either median, and nothing here is a rule. |
| policy | no backfill · no export · read it here · read on the site · not exported: this page is drawn from someone else's archive |
| this build | data to Oct-22 2026 |
| policy | no backfill · no export · read it here · read on the site · not exported: this page is drawn from someone else's archive |
The chart itself is drawn in the browser: turn JavaScript on to hover a day, pick a window and draw your line. The numbers above come from the last build, Oct-23 2026 21:24Z.
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