Market Mood: A Free Alternative to the Fear & Greed Index

If you invest, you've probably checked CNN's Fear & Greed Index at some point. It's one of the most popular market sentiment indicators on the internet — a single number that tells you whether the market is driven by fear or greed.

It's also been largely unchanged for years.

We built Market Mood as a modern alternative. It's a 0–100 composite sentiment index that combines traditional market signals with something CNN's index completely ignores: what people are actually saying on social media and in the news. And it's free for everyone — no paywall, no account required, no monthly view limits.

What is the Fear & Greed Index?

CNN's Fear & Greed Index measures market sentiment using seven indicators derived purely from market data:

Stock Price Momentum — S&P 500 vs its 125-day moving average
Stock Price Strength — New highs vs new lows on the NYSE
Stock Price Breadth — Trading volume in advancing vs declining stocks
Put/Call Ratio — Options market sentiment
Junk Bond Demand — Spread between junk bonds and investment-grade bonds
Market Volatility (VIX) — The CBOE Volatility Index
Safe Haven Demand — Relative performance of stocks vs treasuries

It's a solid framework. But every signal comes from the same place: price and volume data from exchanges. There's no measure of what investors, traders, and analysts are actually talking about.

What is Market Mood?

Market Mood is SentiSense's proprietary sentiment index. Like the Fear & Greed Index, it produces a single 0–100 score with clear phase labels — Extreme Fear, Fear, Neutral, Greed, and Extreme Greed.

The difference is in the signals. Market Mood combines five proprietary indicators built from both market data and social intelligence:

Social Sentiment — AI-analyzed sentiment from Reddit, X/Twitter, and financial news. Are people bullish or bearish in what they're posting and publishing?
Market Direction — Broad market trend signals from price action and technical indicators.
Fear Gauge — Volatility and risk-off signals, similar in spirit to VIX but weighted within our composite framework.
Social Momentum — The velocity of sentiment change. Are social conversations accelerating in a bullish or bearish direction?
S&P 500 Trend — Direct price trend of the benchmark index as a grounding signal.

Each signal is calculated daily from SentiSense's curated data pipeline, which processes over 130,000 news articles and social media posts per month using fine-tuned AI models purpose-built for financial text.

Head-to-Head: Market Mood vs Fear & Greed Index

	Market Mood	CNN Fear & Greed Index
Price	Free, no limits	Free (with ads)
Account required	No	No
Signal sources	Social media + news + market data	Market data only
Social sentiment	Yes (Reddit, X, news)	No
Per-signal breakdown	Yes — see each signal individually	Yes — see each indicator
Historical chart	6 months, with per-signal history	Limited historical view
Sector breakdowns	Yes — per-sector mood scores	No
API access	Yes — REST API	No public API
Update frequency	Daily	Daily

The biggest differentiator is data diversity. CNN's index is built entirely from exchange data — prices, volumes, spreads, and options activity. Market Mood layers social and news sentiment on top of market signals, giving you a more complete picture of what's driving market psychology.

Why Social Signals Matter

Market data tells you what happened. Social signals tell you why — and sometimes, what's about to happen.

Consider earnings season. A stock might be flat on price, but if Reddit and X are exploding with bearish commentary about guidance, that sentiment often leads the next move. Traditional market-data-only indicators miss this entirely until the selling actually starts.

We've seen this pattern repeatedly in our data:

Social sentiment divergences — When social sentiment drops sharply while the market holds steady, it frequently precedes a correction. The crowd processes qualitative information (CEO tone on earnings calls, regulatory rumors, product reviews) faster than it shows up in price action.
Momentum acceleration — Our Social Momentum signal captures when bullish or bearish conversations are accelerating. A market at 50 (Neutral) with rapidly rising social momentum is a very different setup than a market at 50 with flat momentum.
Sector-level signals — Market Mood provides per-sector sentiment breakdowns. You might see the overall market in "Greed" territory while the Technology sector is already shifting toward "Fear" — a divergence that a single market-wide number can't capture.

This is why we built Market Mood to include social intelligence alongside traditional signals. Not to replace market data, but to complement it with the information that pure price-based indicators leave out.

How to Use Market Mood

Market Mood is available in two places:

The SentiSense homepage — app.sentisense.ai shows the current Market Mood score front and center, along with the phase label and weekly change.
The Indexes page — app.sentisense.ai/indexes/market-mood gives you the full experience: interactive 6-month history chart, per-signal breakdown with weekly changes, and sector-level mood scores.

No sign-up required. No paywall. No view limits.

For Developers: API Access

If you want to integrate Market Mood into your own tools or dashboards, the data is available through the SentiSense API:

GET https://app.sentisense.ai/api/v2/market-mood?days=180

The response includes the current composite score, phase label, all five signal values, full daily history, and per-sector breakdowns. Free tier includes 1,000 API requests per month.

Try It Now

Market Mood is live and free for everyone. No account needed — just open the page and see where the market stands today.

See Market Mood live →

SentiSense provides market information and sentiment analysis for informational purposes only. Market Mood and all proprietary indexes are derived from AI-analyzed data and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Always consult a licensed financial advisor.