What the crowd is feeling, on a scale of 0–100.

What the index measures

The widely tracked crypto Fear & Greed Index compresses observable market behavior — volatility against recent norms, momentum and volume, Bitcoin's dominance of total crypto market value, and social and search activity — into a single daily score. Zero is panic; one hundred is euphoria. It does not measure fundamentals. It measures the crowd.

How the desk uses it

As a contrarian conditioning signal, never a trigger. Extreme fear means sellers are exhausted and risk is on sale — historically a better region to accumulate than to liquidate. Extreme greed means the marginal buyer is already in. But sentiment can sit at an extreme for weeks while price keeps trending, which is why the desk reads it alongside funding and positioning and the volatility regime: fear plus negative funding plus a mean-reverting tape is a very different setup from fear alone.

Context matters more than the level: today's 27 against a 30-day band of 11–28 tells you whether sentiment is breaking down, washing out, or just drifting.

The desk's standing view on sentiment

Sentiment indicators earn their keep at extremes and are noise in the middle. Readings between 30 and 70 carry almost no information; the desk's briefs only cite the index when it is pinned at an edge and confirmed by money actually moving — flows, funding, open interest. Every call built on that read is scored in public.