Where the market stands today
Four independent reads of the same market — sentiment, volatility, trend, and breadth — each shown on its own, then combined into one 1–10 number by a formula simple enough to print below. No forecasts: this page describes measured conditions, and it changes as they do.
Today: 8/10 — Risk-on
Sentiment data through 2026-08-18; trend and breadth read each series’ own latest bar. The score reads risk appetite: high means calm, trending, broad markets; low means stressed, downtrending, narrow ones. It is a description, not a recommendation — note that the contrarian reading of sentiment runs the other way, which is why each component below also carries its own label.
| Component | Today’s reading | Score (0–1) |
|---|---|---|
| Fear & Greed | 59 — Greed (contrarian read: trim) | 0.59 |
| Volatility (VIX) | 15.7 — calm | 0.72 |
| S&P 500 regime | Uptrend — risk-on | 1.00 |
| Sector breadth | 7 of 11 sectors in a bullish 50/200-day state | 0.64 |
A missing feed is excluded from the average, never scored as neutral — the same abstain-don’t-substitute rule as everything else on this site.
Sector rotation
The 11 SPDR sector ETFs, native-USD trailing returns, leaders first. “Trend” is each ETF’s own 50/200-day moving-average state — the breadth component above is the share of these that read bullish.
| Sector | ETF | 1w | 1m | 3m | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | XLE | +4.0% | +8.5% | +3.3% | bullish |
| Information Technology | XLK | +2.1% | +8.4% | +9.2% | bullish |
| Industrials | XLI | +0.9% | +3.9% | +9.1% | bullish |
| Health Care | XLV | -0.8% | +3.7% | +14.6% | bullish |
| Materials | XLB | -1.8% | +3.4% | +4.0% | bullish |
| Financials | XLF | -0.4% | +2.4% | +11.3% | bullish |
| Consumer Discretionary | XLY | -2.4% | +1.1% | +0.4% | mixed |
| Communication Services | XLC | -0.9% | +0.1% | -5.3% | mixed |
| Consumer Staples | XLP | -0.3% | -0.6% | -1.4% | bullish |
| Real Estate | XLRE | +1.0% | -1.3% | +2.5% | mixed |
| Utilities | XLU | +2.4% | -2.2% | +0.6% | mixed |
How the score is computed
Each read maps to 0–1: Fear & Greed is the index divided by 100; VIX scores 1.0 at 10 or below and 0.0 at 30 or above, linear between; the S&P regime scores Uptrend 1.0, Recovering 0.65, Weakening 0.35, Downtrend 0.0 (price and 50/200-day averages on the index’s own currency); breadth is the share of sector ETFs in a bullish state. The composite is the plain average of whichever components have data, scaled to 1–10. That’s the whole formula — if you disagree with a weighting, you can see exactly what to disagree with.
What it is not: a timing signal. A high score describes calm — markets have spent years at 8 — and a low one describes stress that has sometimes been the best moment to invest of a decade. If you want to know what acting on any rule would have done, test it on real prices.
The link always shows the current reading, not a snapshot.