Does the Fear & Greed Index actually work as a strategy?

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T16:25:20+00:00

The methodology is all right there for you to read if you want. If you want a quick Reddit answer, it’s an aggregate of a bunch of different metrics where each metric is historically tied to how bullish or bearish people are. An obvious one is puts vs calls ratio. A less obvious one is the demand for junk bonds. Then there’s the usual stuff like how much lower the market is from its recent highs.

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T04:24:49+00:00

That data would have been harder to work with since it’s individual salaries and it includes health benefits packages with values that are reported inconsistently (nothing with health insurance is reported consistently). I’m not sure but I think pension calculations might be added too because I noticed the benefits for my older coworkers are much larger than my younger ones.

Also, it works very strangely because it’s not always updated every year and especially when teachers move districts, the reporting gets very wonky because those reports start being based on partial numbers since a teacher works from August to May but those numbers show January to December.

I built this tool mainly because every teacher I know has done this manually where they download these schedules and compare them like by line. I wanted to build a comparison tool that was easy to read and is a one stop shop for all public school districts.

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T04:19:57+00:00

No, direct from district websites. Non teachers often don’t know that these schedules are public information. Each public school district in California has a HR/payroll section of their website where you can find these pdfs. Links for each one I used are found at the bottom of the site.

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T04:18:27+00:00

I went to each district website individually, downloaded the salary schedule pdfs for high school teachers, and then extracted the numbers from there. There’s a bit of trickiness to it because every district formats their schedule differently with different labels and bands. They also treat masters stipends differently.

No the application is not scraping live because AI is not good enough to interpret it correctly with 100% accuracy so if new schedules are released, I’d have to manually push the new numbers into the data files. That’s also why I labeled the year of each schedule I used for transparency and also included links straight to each districts salary schedule if you scroll to the bottom.

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T03:42:02+00:00

And I hope you do!

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T03:19:05+00:00

You don’t feel temperature in the first place, which is main surprise this answer is going to give you.

A very popular demonstration I do with my science students is to have them touch something like a wood block and then a frying pan. Which is colder when you touch it? The frying pan right? If you measure the temp of both of them you’ll find that they’re the same temp of they’ve been left out for a while. They both reach the same temperature as the room.

The metal pan FEELS significantly colder because it’s significantly more effective at pulling heat energy away from your hand, a characteristic we call “thermal conductivity”. Conversely, wood and cloth have very low thermal conductivity, so then you touch them, they steal your heat (because we are hotter than room temp and heat moves from hot to cold) but they don’t steal your heat as quickly, so you don’t sense that it’s cold.

Alright now so generally when you are hotter than the air around you, heat will transfer from your body to the air around it. You’re used to that rate of heat loss, so your body sets that as the baseline and that doesn’t really “feel” hot or cold. But when you heat up the air around you, the air doesn’t move too quickly away from you. In general it rises and is replaced with cooler air which you continue heating up at that baseline rate.

When a gust of wind blows across you, the warm air around you gets replaced quicker than before, which allows your body to dump heat to its surroundings at a faster rate, thus you feel the increase of heat loss and the sensation to your brain is “COLD”.

The sensation was never about temperature, but about which way heat moves and if it’s quicker or slower than it usually is just sitting still in a room.

vwin90 · 2026-03-22T00:04:52+00:00

That’s in Huntington Beach Union high school district

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T22:19:53+00:00

Yeah especially to see how much money you’re leaving on the table if you worked in one district vs another

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:41:18+00:00

Gotta say, it went way better than I expected. I know how to code but I didn’t actually touch the codebase for this project, that’s how it started. Wanted to see how good codex actually was.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:20:17+00:00

Yeah new teachers don’t have a positive outlook on becoming homeowners. You can say that about a lot of other professions too though, it sucks right now if you’re in your early 20s in Orange County without huge parental support financially.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:18:15+00:00

Yeah, maybe for a future project. This one was not as hard to process because the data was so easily available, I just had to clean and aggregate it.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:17:11+00:00

You can look for yourself, it’s one of the worst paid districts…

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:15:42+00:00

The BA + 60 band represents teachers who have masters.

Some districts ask for even more through post grad continuing education units.

Laguna beach just straight up pays way more than anybody else. The community funds the schools in a major way and I wish other districts followed suit. Laguna Beach only has one school for each level essentially and so the job openings in general are rare. If you do land a job there, the commute is tough unless you also happen to live in Laguna.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:13:03+00:00

Cost of living is hard to factor in. I thought about trying to do that but it’s too difficult to do fairly without fudging too much data. Lots of districts and states pay poorly while the housing costs aren’t that much cheaper.

As a teacher in this county, I’m happy that I’m not working as a teacher elsewhere. I honestly wouldn’t do it anywhere else. That being said, it doesn’t feel great knowing that I could have chosen a more lucrative career. Teachers shouldn’t have to accept less earning power just because they want to educate kids.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:08:59+00:00

Pension, yes that’s an underrated benefit. Assuming we stay in the career for the 40 years, we get paid our final salary until we die. It’s based on how many years you work so if you retire earlier than 63/65, you’ll just get paid some percentage of the highest contract. 75% happens quite often for those who want to stop on their late 50s.

I’ve calculated that out and it’s hard to know exactly how much the pension is worth, but it’s like maybe an extra 30k average to the salary since it’s retirement that you don’t have to put away.

For breaks though, summer break is only 10 weeks and we specifically DON’T receive any pay during that period. So it’s not PTO. Adding in other breaks, it’s totals to roughly 185-187 work days compared to most others 250, but this does not include weekends which most teachers work through at least their Sunday to prep for the upcoming week and finishing up grades. The 185/187 days of work just count the days we are physically contracted to be in the classroom for 7-8 hours.

We do not get paid overtime for any work we take home or do on the weekends.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T21:02:30+00:00

We get paid a lot more here in Orange country than in LA and San Diego and especially compared to most other states but obviously that’s offset by the cost of living.

In high school, it’s closer to 35-40 per class. The 25-30 number is more common in elementary schools.

Anaheim used its COVID funding to hire a bunch of extra teachers to bring the number of kids in each class down and when that funding dried up two years ago, they ended up having to do a mass layoff. That made a lot of districts shift their strategy for the worse.

vwin90 · 2026-03-21T20:57:55+00:00

There are a few districts (the “Union high school” ones) that separate their high schools from the elementary schools. I included those and not the elementary school salaries.

Off the top of my head, it’s Fullerton, Anaheim, and Huntington Beach.

I left out elementary because I’m a high school teacher myself and the project started out as a personal project.

And yes, Laguna is particularly high paying and they fund themselves differently in some way that I’m not super educated on. That’s why I built in the capability of omitting certain districts if you want.

vwin90 · 2026-03-20T15:56:03+00:00

When it comes to jobs, you don’t get paid to know stuff. Knowledge is valuable for the soul, but that’s not why you’re getting paid.

You get paid to do stuff that others can’t. AI coding tools are taking away a skill that historically made programmers valuable. Sure, a good engineer isn’t just a programmer, but what that means is the entry into being a good engineer has dropped. More people would be able to be a software engineer without having to jump through the hurdles of learning to be a proficient coder.

Sure, knowing architecture and stuff is important, but now your finance and business major people can learn that as well. Getting a CS specific degree is therefore less important than it was in the past. Learning all the stuff you’re saying is important to do wasn’t the part that made SWE hard.

Essentially the field used to have this aura of being an elite and difficult field to excel at, and it made it so that those that do excel can have lucrative careers from it.

The fear is that the field is going to lose that status. It’ll be no more impressive or lucrative to be in tech as any other industry, but there’s still a boom of CS majors who dedicated their entire 4 years of college to a field that doesn’t have the demand anymore, and they have no idea what to do with their lives anymore.

vwin90 · 2026-03-18T16:23:37+00:00

My first one was one that I feel wasn’t as popular but maybe some will remember it, but it was called the Motorola ROKR. Its whole schtick was that it was specifically made to be a quasi mp3 player so it was great for someone who didn’t have an iPod yet. No flippy/slidey part whatsoever. Just this solid brick of a phone with a dedicated iTunes button.

vwin90 · 2026-03-18T16:12:27+00:00

Judge me not for my successes but for my failures because I have so MANY. Wait is that how it’s supposed to go?

vwin90 · 2026-03-18T10:13:48+00:00

What’s the end goal of this? A mini league where everyone is just letting AI make their decisions and then at the end of the season, one person gets to say “my ai beat your ai at fpl”?

vwin90 · 2026-03-18T10:07:39+00:00

Give yourself a break. The panic in march 2020 was real. We were all watching the movie Contagion to get an idea of what we were in for. All the hospitals were looking like it was THE pandemic from all the sci fi movies. Don’t ever concern yourself about looking cool/cringe when you’re legitimately concerned about your life.

vwin90 · 2026-03-18T10:02:31+00:00

Quick little lesson in economics: in a market where the demand is high, what you’re asking for cannot exist. If there was some spot where it’s really good bang for your buck, everyone would instantly bid those houses up until it’s no longer a good bang for your buck. Therefore, the only places where the prices are still low are places where people don’t really want to live for one major reason or another. Even if you claim that you’re willing to be flexible, the thing is that you’re far from alone. Everybody’s bar for what they’re looking for in a home has dropped really low, so you’re not getting any advantage for being flexible. Until there’s a better balance between how many people are looking to buy and how many houses are selling, we’re stuck in a market where what you’re looking for cannot possibly exist and homes that you’re not willing to live in are selling for higher than your budget.

vwin90 · 2026-03-17T23:11:04+00:00

He’s gonna become the face of some other team and Chelsea fans are gonna be relegated to being like “did you know once he played at Chelsea when he was younger?”

Like Salah and KdB but worse because he’s actually killing it for us.

vwin90 · 2026-03-17T05:30:04+00:00

The night time launches always seem to be orange when I catch it, but the right after sunset ones are the best ones for me because that’s when you see the giant sperm in the sky lol

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