Economy and Fear and Greed

Guides

Economy is the backdrop: how fearful or greedy each market is, how many recession indicators are flashing, what prediction markets price, and which sectors the macro data favours.

Fear and Greed

One dial per market, the United States, South Africa and Bitcoin. The score runs 0 to 100 in five bands: Extreme fear below 20, Fear to 40, Neutral to 60, Greed to 80, Extreme greed above. Current is today; 7d ago is the reading a week earlier.

Index components (Pro) lists the drivers. Each is a public series normalised to a score between -1 and +1 against its own recent history, with a sign so that positive always means greed. The dial is the average of the drivers, mapped to 0 to 100. A driver marked (stale) is older than its tolerance and is dropped from the average until it updates.

The US dial uses six drivers: S&P 500 momentum, the VIX, junk bond demand, the yield curve, the count of 52-week lows, and safe-haven demand. The South African dial uses five: JSE Top 40 momentum, the rand against the dollar, JSE volatility, the SARB policy signal, and a credit spread proxy borrowed from the US high-yield market, because there is no daily South African equivalent.

The Bitcoin dial uses four: the Alternative.me index, 30-day volatility, price momentum and market dominance.

Recession Risk

The count of eleven indicators flashing, the state it implies, and the six most reliable indicators with whether each is Active or clear. The reliability figure beside each is how well that indicator alone separated US recession months from healthy ones, out of sample, since 2000. The full breakdown is the Recession Alert page. Pro.

Prediction Markets

Market-implied probabilities on macro questions from Polymarket, with the leading outcome, the resolution date and the liquidity behind the price. Macro context, not a read on any index. Pro.

Bitcoin Demand

A separate composite on a -2 to +2 scale from three drivers: the change in long-term holder balances on chain, the change in corporate treasury holdings, and ETF flows. The posture bands are Cash below -0.3, Hold from -0.3 to 0, and Long above 0. Pro.

Sector Sentiment

A board of sectors, eleven for the US and seven for South Africa, with a switch between the two. Each sector's score is a weighted average of the macro series that matter to it (interest rates, inflation, the currency, commodity prices, employment, sentiment surveys), each series z-scored against one year of its own history and clamped to a range of -1 to +1.

• Bullish at +0.25 or above, Bearish at -0.25 or below, Neutral between.
• Conviction: Strong when the score is 0.50 or more from zero in either direction, which means the average driver sits about one standard deviation from its norm; Moderate from 0.25; Weak below that.

The ⓘ on a sector row lists its drivers and each one's current score. Star any Fear and Greed driver or any sector to add it to your Watchlist. Scores update daily. Free sees the top-ranked sector; the rest is Pro.