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What 14 years of data shows
"Be greedy when others are fearful" is one of the most repeated lines in investing. This calculator tests it on 3,523 daily readings of the Market Mood Index from March 2012 to 6 October 2026, each paired with that day's Nifty 50 close.
- Fear gave a short-term edge. The median 1-year return after an Extreme Fear day was 13.0%, against 10.5% for a day picked at random.
- The edge faded. Over 3 to 5 years, the median annual return for every mood ended up within about one percentage point of the others.
- Extreme Greed was not a signal to stop. Its median 1-year return was 12.9%, and over 5 years it had the highest median of the four moods, at 13.3% a year.
- Waiting in cash for fear cost a little. A regular ₹10,000 SIP returned 9.81% XIRR; waiting for the index to fall below 30 returned 9.77% with cash earning 6%, and 9.68% with cash earning nothing.
Record highs explain part of this. The Nifty closed at a new all-time high on 335 days in this data, and only 2 of those days were in Extreme Fear. Rising markets are what make people greedy, and rising markets often keep rising.
Why the edge from fear is smaller than it looks
Extreme fear tells you people are scared. It does not tell you the fall is over. On 6 March 2020 the index read 12.4, deeper fear than at the Covid bottom two weeks later, and the Nifty went on to fall another 31%. The lowest reading in this data, 10.0 on 21 January 2026, came with the Nifty at 25,157; by 6 October 2026 it was 9.5% lower.
For a SIP investor the practical question is not whether fear days were good entry points, but whether waiting for them beats simply staying invested. In this data it did not. Use the SIP calculator to see what a regular SIP builds over your own horizon, or the XIRR calculator to check returns on irregular investments.
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How this calculator works
- Data: daily Market Mood Index and Nifty 50 closing values, 12 Mar 2012 to 6 Oct 2026. Where a date appeared twice, the readings were averaged.
- Mood bands: Extreme Fear below 30, Fear 30 to 50, Greed 50 to 70, Extreme Greed 70 and above, following Tickertape's current zones.
- Lump sum: each day in the data is one entry. The exit is the first day on or after the same date 1, 3, 6, 12, 36 or 60 months later. Windows overlap, so the counts are entry days, not independent periods.
- SIP: instalments go in on the first trading day of each month. Waiting money grows daily at the parked-cash rate, an assumption rather than any fund's actual return, and is invested in full on the first day the index is below the trigger. Returns are XIRR.
- Not included: dividends (this is the Nifty 50 price index, which leaves out roughly 1 to 1.5% a year), taxes, exit loads and fund expenses.
Past performance may or may not be sustained in the future. This is a historical illustration, not a forecast or a recommendation. See the calculator methodology and disclaimer.