Price tells one story. Our emotions tell another.
Here is Bitcoin's price since 2018. Its color follows the market's mood: icy blue when fear takes over, fiery red when euphoria sets in. Explore the curve, then see what it says about our reflexes.
Latest published score
…/100
Linear: each gridline adds the same number of dollars. Logarithmic: the same height stands for the same percentage change, so 2018 and today can be compared without flattening the early years.
One point per week · Thursday price and 7-day average score
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Curve color: Fear & Greed score, from 0 to 100
Fear & Greed score: Alternative.me · BTC/USD price: mempool.space · How this chart is built
The height of the curve shows the price of Bitcoin. Its color shows the estimated market sentiment.
When Bitcoin goes up, you're afraid of missing the train. When it goes down, you're afraid of losing what's left. Yet in between, it's the same Bitcoin, with the same rules and the same 21 million cap. What changes is the color of the curve. And quite often, the way we make our decisions.
This page won't tell you when to buy or when to sell. It helps you spot the moments when emotion is at the wheel, and understand why it happens to everyone.
Bitcoin's price never stops: it moves at night, on weekends and during holidays. And it shows up everywhere, in green or red, to the second. Nobody checks the value of their apartment every five minutes. With Bitcoin you can, and every move is lived in real time.
Four ingredients make this show hard to watch calmly:
These reactions can feed each other:
A possible loop, not an automatic mechanism: it can also stop on its own.
Watch out for the opposite shortcut: emotions don't explain everything. News (a regulation, a hack, a central bank decision), the liquidity available on exchanges, leverage and its cascading liquidations, or very concrete constraints, like having to sell to pay a bill or repay a loan, also move the price. Fear and euphoria often amplify moves they didn't start on their own.
Plenty of people have had this feeling. It deserves to be taken seriously, without turning it into a law: not everyone buys at the top or sells at the bottom, and nobody is personally cursed. But several well-documented biases make those bad moments more tempting than they should be. Market regulators describe them too, for example the UK's FCA and Spain's CNMV.
You wait for it to rise before you feel reassured. Except the more it rises, the more obvious buying looks, and the higher the price you pay.
You hesitate when bitcoin is at $60,000. You make up your mind at $75,000, because "this time, it's taking off".
Individual investors buy more of what grabs their attention: stocks in the news or that just moved sharply (Barber and Odean, 2008).
When everyone around you talks about Bitcoin, general enthusiasm starts to look like proof. Yet a hundred people copying each other don't bring a hundred pieces of information.
Three friends have bought, your feed talks about nothing else, and the echo ends up sounding like certainty.
People can follow others while setting their own information aside, and these crowd movements can reverse abruptly (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch, 1992).
The move of the last few weeks ends up looking like tomorrow's direction. After three months of gains, gains feel normal. After three months of losses, the fall feels endless.
"It's up 30% in a month, it'll keep going." Or the opposite, with exactly the same confidence.
Across nearly fifty years of surveys, investors' return expectations rise after market gains and fall after declines (Greenwood and Shleifer, 2014).
Losing hurts more than winning feels good. A 20% drop can become hard to bear, even if you knew it could happen.
You planned to hold your bitcoin for five years. By the third day in the red, you don't dare open the app anymore.
Nuance: this bias doesn't always lead to panic selling. It can also do the opposite, pushing people to hold a losing position too long so the loss doesn't "become real". That's the disposition effect: selling winners too early, riding losers too long (Shefrin and Statman, 1985; Odean, 1998, based on the accounts of 10,000 individual investors).
Once you've taken a position, you mostly look for what proves you right. Opposing views seem less serious, good news more solid.
You read to the end the article predicting a rise, and skim the one about the risks.
A bias found in many fields, well beyond finance (Nickerson, 1998).
Afterwards, a peak looks obvious. At the time, nobody knew it was one. Hindsight bias makes us feel we could have predicted it, and therefore that we'll predict the next one.
"Everyone could see it was too high." Everyone, really?
Knowing how a story ends makes us overestimate how predictable it was (Fischhoff, 1975).
Some decisions stay etched in memory: the sale right before a rally, the purchase right before a crash. They come to mind more easily than ordinary decisions, and we end up believing they sum up the way we invest.
A single bad sale can be enough to make you doubt your whole plan, years later.
What comes to mind easily seems more frequent (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). Lived experiences also shape our appetite for risk, sometimes decades later (Malmendier and Nagel, 2011). I cover this from another angle in Beware of your past experiences.
Here is one possible scenario, not a law of the market. It doesn't play out every time, or in this order for everyone. But if you recognize a scene, that's already useful information.
"I'll wait."
The price rises slowly. You watch, there's no rush.
"Still going up?"
The rise continues. You open the chart more and more often.
"I'm going to miss the start."
Everyone's talking about it, the numbers are racing. Waiting becomes uncomfortable.
"Fine, I'm buying."
You buy to silence the discomfort more than out of conviction.
"It's just a dip."
The price falls back. You reassure yourself and look for good news.
"I want it to stop."
The drop drags on. What you want now, above all, is for the anxiety to end.
And then? It depends. The price can recover, go sideways or keep falling, and nobody knows the next scene. That's exactly why it's better not to let emotion write the rest of the script for you.
Alternative.me's Fear & Greed Index sums up the mood of the Bitcoin market in a score from 0 to 100: 0 for extreme fear, 100 for extreme greed. It has been published every day since February 1, 2018.
It isn't a poll of all investors. It's a composite indicator that combines several weighted measures. According to the method described by Alternative.me:
The provider doesn't publish the details of its calculations, and its description isn't dated: read these weights as an order of magnitude. With surveys paused, the actual split can't be exactly this one anyway.
Key point: at least half of the score comes from market data, volatility and price momentum. So it's no surprise that it tracks the price. A sharp drop drives volatility up, which pushes the score down. The link between the color and the curve is not independent proof that the index predicts anything.
Alternative.me actually presents its index with a contrarian idea: extreme fear could be a buying opportunity, excessive greed would signal a correction. That's the provider's hypothesis, not a proven result, and this chart doesn't use it as a rule.
Since 2018, the index has spent about 23% of days in extreme fear and 9% in extreme greed (history as of September 19, 2026).
An extreme sentiment can last. A fearful market can keep falling, and a euphoric market can keep rising for a long time. Here are a few episodes taken from this chart's data, in the "All" view: one point per week, prices rounded to the nearest hundred dollars. They go both ways, on purpose.
The weekly average slips into extreme fear in the week of April 22 to 28, 2022, with a price around $39,200. It stays there for thirteen weeks in a row. Meanwhile, the price drops below $20,000 in June. And the year's low only comes in November, around $15,900, with an average score of 32: fear, not even extreme.
From the week of November 6 to 12, 2020 to the week of January 15 to 21, 2021, the average stays in extreme greed, eleven weeks in a row. The price goes from about $15,700 to $35,500. Red didn't signal an imminent top.
Week of March 13 to 19, 2020: average score of 10, price around $5,400. Seven months later, in the week of October 16 to 22, 2020, the price is above $12,800. It's the example everyone quotes. It's real, but at the time, nothing said how long the fear would last.
Week of March 8 to 14, 2024: average score of 82, price around $72,900. By late June, in the week of June 21 to 27, 2024, the price has fallen back to about $60,900 and the average score is back to 48, in neutral territory.
Week of February 13 to 19, 2026: average score of 9 out of 100, price around $66,400. Calling that the bottom would have been a mistake: in the week of June 26 to July 2, 2026, the price fell to about $59,700, with an average score of 15.
Week of December 25 to 31, 2020: about $28,900, average score of 92, extreme greed. Week of May 13 to 19, 2022: about $28,700, average score of 11, extreme fear. Almost the same price, two opposite moods. Same scene between the week of March 1 to 7, 2024 ($66,300, score 82) and the week of February 13 to 19, 2026 ($66,400, score 9).
These episodes don't form a rule, in either direction. Above all, they're a reminder that an extreme score describes the mood of a moment, not what happens next.
No score, no profile, no verdict. Just five questions to ask yourself before hitting "buy" or "sell".
If an answer makes you uneasy, it's neither a buy signal nor a sell signal. It's a signal to slow down. And if social media weighs heavily in the balance, read Social media: use it before it uses you too.
An indicator published every day by Alternative.me that sums up Bitcoin market sentiment in a score from 0 (extreme fear) to 100 (extreme greed). It combines several measures: volatility, market momentum and volume, social media, Bitcoin dominance and search trends. It has existed since February 1, 2018.
They show the Fear & Greed score of each point, never the price or its change: icy blue for extreme fear, blue for fear, light gray for neutral, orange for greed and fiery red for extreme greed. A dashed gray line marks a day with no published score.
No. Extreme fear can last for weeks while the price keeps falling: in 2022, the weekly average stayed in extreme fear for thirteen weeks, and the year's low came months later. Conversely, the extreme greed of late 2020 came with a doubling of the price. The score describes a mood, it doesn't predict what comes next.
Because the public price history used here only has one value per week before 2023. Over the whole history, the chart therefore shows one point per Thursday, with the average of the week's 7 daily scores. The 1-month, 6-month and 1-year views show one point per day.
Alternative.me publishes a new score every day at 00:00 UTC. The chart pairs it with the price recorded at 01:00 UTC and picks it up within the following hours. The latest published score and its date are shown above the chart.
Because it partly depends on it: according to the published method, volatility and market momentum make up half of the score. A sharp drop drives volatility up, and therefore the score down. The resemblance between the color and the curve doesn't prove that the index predicts price moves.
An information tool. This chart describes the past and a sentiment indicator published by a third party. It is not financial advice, gives no buy or sell signal and does not predict the price of Bitcoin. Read the disclaimer.
