I really love Yosef Bonaparte’s work at the University of Colorado, because he tends to come up with practical ideas that are easy to implement and practitioners like I help. With his recent Global Fomo -paperHe did it again.
FOMO (fear of missing, for the non -people) is now spoken for more than a decade in the investment world as part of the explanation why American technical shares, cryptocurrencies and meme shares do what they do. So Bonaparte decided to design a simple indicator that aims to measure the global FOMO and see if that can predict or at the least explain that stock market behavior.
To build his global FOMO index, he just went to Google Trends and searched for six terms:
FOMO
Buy shares
Get rich quickly
Miss
Trending now
Bitcoin -price
He then simply added the six results to one signal and tested if that was able to predict stock markets.
Global Fomo
Source: Bonaparte (2025), Google Trends
He discovered that the times of high FOMO are followed by returns with low power, in accordance with what you would expect. When people chase the return for fear of missing, they do not buy shares because they are fundamentally useful, but because they are now trending or because they have achieved a great efficiency in the recent past.
However, the effect size is not too great. A 20-point increase in the global FOMO index leads on average to a fall of one percentage point in the stock market rides in the next 12 months. But at least it’s something and we now have a considerable way to measure FOMO on the market.
#Measure #Fomo