What is the Ânima Index?

Concept

The Ânima Index is the Radar Perene mood thermometer: a measure, from 0 to 100, of the state of spirit of the domestic investor. It does not measure what the market does with its money — that is flow. It measures how the market feels.

How to read it. Low values indicate pessimism; high ones, euphoria. The extremes matter more than the middle: over the series, the index has scraped the floor of the scale in moments of panic and approached the top in phases of euphoria. Most of the time, though, mood drifts through the neutral zone.

Why it matters. The Ânima value is almost never the whole story on its own. The information appears when it disagrees with the other thermometers — risk appetite and the intermarket structure. It is in that divergence that the signal lives: mood and flow often tell different stories.

What it is not. Ânima is not a forecast or a buy signal. Mood at the floor does not say "now it rises"; it says sentiment has reached an extreme — and what comes next, the archive shows case by case, with no guarantees.

Related episodes: The March 2020 panic (mood at the floor of the scale) · The 2023 euphoria that prices did not confirm · How long does it take for mood to catch up to flow? →

Characters: Mood