BTC VIX
How much movement the options market expects in US stocks over the next month. When Wall Street panics, crypto usually feels it within hours.
The VIX is built from the prices people pay for S&P 500 options. Those prices say how big a move the market is bracing for over the next 30 days, expressed as an annualised percentage.
A VIX of 18 means options are priced for roughly an 18% annualised swing.
Under about 15 the stock market is calm and money is comfortable taking risk. Above 30 something is breaking, and in every crypto drawdown of the last decade the VIX was already elevated.
It spikes and decays fast, so read spikes as events, not as trends. These are the historical ranges, not thresholds we are promising anything about.
Published as-is by CBOE and redistributed by FRED; we store and draw the daily close without altering it.
Business days **only** — the VIX does not exist at weekends or on US market holidays, and no value is invented for those days. Bitcoin trades every one of those days, which is exactly why the correlation chart pairs the two only on dates the VIX actually has a reading. History starts January 1990. ALERT THRESHOLD.
The VIX-spike alert fires at 32.94 index points — the MEASURED 95th percentile of all 9,238 daily closes in this series (1990-01-02 → 2026-07-27), **never** a round number. That line has been crossed 148 times on this history, 74 up and 74 back down, about 4.0 a year, and the days above it fall in 20 different calendar years, so it is not an artefact of one crisis. The alert reports where the index closed; it says nothing about bitcoin.
Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Volatility Index, via FRED series VIXCLS.
FRED VIXCLS — CBOE Volatility Index, daily close · business-daily · history from 1990-01