Is extreme fear a buy signal?
A Fear and Greed reading of 20 or below means the market has capitulated and it is time to buy.
Where we are now. Today the index reads 62, against a threshold of 20. Shaded bands are the 5 occasions the rule fired, the same ones counted in the table below: 2018-02, 2019-07, 2021-05, 2024-08, 2025-02.
This rule has fired 5 times. A doubling followed within a year on 1 of the 5. On comparable days when it did not fire, a doubling followed 50.1% of the time.
| Times it fired | 5 | separate occasions, not days |
|---|---|---|
| Still open | 1 | fired since 2025-11-08; the 365-day window has not closed, so these are excluded from the figures above rather than counted as a success or a failure |
| What followed | 20.0% | a doubling within 365 days of that close |
| Could plausibly be | 5% to 56% | the range the true rate could take, on this many occasions, before you invoke anything but chance; a binomial interval that treats the episodes as independent trials |
| Happened anyway | 50.1% | comparable days when the rule did not fire |
| Difference | -30.1 pts | near zero means the signal added nothing |
Where the claim comes from
Alternative.me's Crypto Fear and Greed Index, published daily since February 2018. "Be greedy when others are fearful" is probably the most repeated piece of advice in the market, and the index turned it into a number people can point at.
How we tested it
Trigger: index at 20 or below. Scored as a bottom rule: did the price double within 365 days?
Only days the rule could have fired are counted. Consecutive triggers within 90 days are one occasion. The baseline excludes each trigger and the 90 days after it, because the aftermath of a signal is not a fair comparison. No verdict is given below 20 occasions.
What the numbers say
Five occasions. 20.0% followed by a doubling within a year, against 50.1% on comparable days when the rule did not fire: a 30.1-point gap, negative, on 5 observations. The signal was followed by a doubling far less often than comparable days when the index was higher. Very few observations, all since 2018.
What this does not mean
This is not evidence that buying fear is a mistake. Five episodes cannot establish that. It does mean the confident version of the advice has no support here, which is a different and more useful thing to know.
And it does not mean the threshold itself was chosen fairly. Every rule in this registry was specified by someone who had already seen bitcoin’s history, so the cut-off is fitted to the record it is being judged against. The interval above measures sampling variation between independent trials and nothing else: not the choice of threshold, not that cycle turns are few and related, and not that thirty-six rules were tested in total. Only the forward record, which fixes a rule before its answer is known, avoids this.
What would change the answer
The index only starts in 2018, so this covers one and a half cycles. Another decade would make it scoreable.
If you cannot time it, the question changes
Most of the claims in this registry cannot be shown to beat a coin flip, and several are worse than one. That is not an argument against holding bitcoin. It is an argument that the decision worth spending effort on is how much to hold, not when to buy.
That is what How much bitcoin? is for: what fixed weights actually did in a conventional portfolio, and how much the answer depended on the year you started. For the valuation state today, and what has historically followed readings like it, see Where Things Stand.
Recomputed from the daily public snapshot by fetch/scorecard.py and published as scorecard.json. Method on the methods page; every claim in the scorecard.