Introduction
Sep 26, 2025
We used to follow the old principle of Mass Psychology (MP). That worked when information dripped, when time stretched, when people had breathing room to process. However, in the age of AI, soundbites, and social media, where the brain has been rewired to function like a slot machine for dopamine, MP in its old form is too blunt. People no longer hold thoughts; they grab phrases, latch onto symbols, repeat headlines. Attention itself has fractured.
That’s why we had to move to vectors. It’s not enough to ask, “What does the crowd feel?” We need to ask where those feelings are going, how quickly they coalesce, and whether they can bend the market before anyone sees the shape forming.
This is why we began discussing Vector and non-linear thinking. Traditional psychology was linear stimulus-response. In the AI age, Mass Psychology must evolve into Vector Mass Psychology: a higher, more nuanced form of non-linear thought, fused with vectors and applied to the crowd. Welcome to VMP.
Explanation
VMP is the upgraded lens. Mass psychology isn’t static sentiment anymore; it’s a live force, a directional surge. In formula form, it looks like this:
Ψ=M×V×CΨ = M \times V \times C
To keep the signal interpretable, we normalise it:
Ψ normalized=M×V×C3Ψ_{normalized} = \sqrt[3]{M \times V \times C}
Why the cube root? Because the raw product can explode when the Magnitude and Coherence lock in. Multiply three strong values together, and you’re suddenly staring at a million; impossible to read on the same scale as the inputs. The cube root compresses that surge back into human range without flattening the story. A square root would crush the sign, erasing whether the surge is euphoric or panicked. The cube root, by contrast, reins in the extremes while keeping direction intact. Panic stays negative, euphoria stays positive, and the score remains comparable across regimes.
Where:
M (Magnitude) = how charged the emotion is (fear, greed, hope, complacency).
V (Vector Direction) = where the bias points (buy, sell, freeze).
C (Coherence) = how aligned the herd is (0 = scattered noise, 1 = unified stampede).
The crowd doesn’t just have feelings; they have trajectories. Fear scattered across 10,000 micro-narratives is nothing but background buzz. Fear locked onto a single trigger; a bank run, a war headline, a margin call, becomes a shockwave. By scaling and cube-rooting the result, VMP captures both the force and the direction, without letting one manic surge or panic spiral blow the entire system off balance.
Market Use Examples: Scoring VMP
Earnings Miss Example
o A big tech name misses earnings; retail chatter spikes (Magnitude: high).
o The bias is overwhelmingly sell (Vector: negative).
o Social feeds, TikToks, Reddit threads; all repeating the same bear line (Coherence: near 1).
o Score: Ψ surges—this isn’t noise, it’s a stampede forming. Expect gap-down cascades, and with them, some of the best buying opportunities born from fear itself.
Macro “Fear Event” Example
o Headline: possible rate cut delay. Magnitude spikes (fear, anger).
o But bias is split: some scream “recession risk,” others “strong economy.” (Vector: split).
o coherence: fractured. Half the crowd is buying the dips, while the other half waits for doom.
o Score: Ψ stays muted—emotions are loud but incoherent. No unified force has yet emerged, which makes this fertile ground for quiet accumulation while the crowd argues.
Short-Squeeze Example
o Stock with heavy short interest catches a rumour. Retail Magnitude jumps (hope, greed).
o Vector: strongly buy.
o Coherence: 4chan, Twitter, Discord, Reddit; all aligned on the same meme.
o Score: Ψ explodes—conditions for a squeeze ignition. These are moments to harvest volatility: trade the mania’s thrust, then step aside as euphoria burns itself out.
Flash-Crash Panic Example (Rare)
o External shock hits—pandemic headlines, financial plumbing seizing, liquidity vanishing. Magnitude: extreme fear, off the charts.
o Vector: overwhelmingly sell, no counterweight.
o coherence: absolute unity—every sector, every feed, every portfolio dumping in lockstep.
o Score: Ψ hits its rarest extreme; panic crystallised into a single directional thrust. This is when we back the truck up as if there’s no tomorrow. Case in point: the COVID-19 meltdown of March 2020, when forced liquidations created generational buying opportunities for those willing to step into the market.
Vector Mass Psychology: From Mood to Measurable Force
This is what gave rise to the Vector Psychology System (VPS). If VMP is the lens, VPS is the gauge; the translation of crowd mood into something you can track and score. The system isn’t a black box; it’s a repeatable ritual. You gather the stress points and speculative veins, strip them onto a shared scale, and let the balance expose itself. The point isn’t frequency, it’s clarity: when the signals align, psychology crystallises; when they scatter, it dissolves back into noise.
In the past, before AI reached its current capabilities, a project like this would have taken years to complete, involving trial and error and endless manual coding. The irony now isn’t that AI lacks sophistication; it’s that the crowd still lags behind, spitting out rubbish and demanding Gold. With sharper tools in hand, the build now compresses into weeks. Once the optimal mix is locked, the final version should be up and running relatively soon.
What matters is the structure: enthusiasm stacked against dread, each side drawing fuel from multiple streams. On the euphoric flank: margin debt sprinting ahead of the economy, triple-levered ETFs swallowing volume, IPOs launching hot, bitcoin rising in rhythm with equities, penny stocks spinning like carnival tickets. On the fearful flank: search spikes for “market crash,” Gold outrunning the S&P, junk spreads cracking open relative to investment grade, investor sentiment sliding, stress indices climbing, correlations snapping tight across sectors.
Every input is stripped of raw units and scaled to a shared range, with zero representing dormancy and one hundred representing extreme values. The crowd’s hunger for risk is then offset by its tremors of fear, and the raw gap is tempered by harmony. If half the signals scream euphoria and half scream panic, the score collapses into static. But if they align, fear across credit, Gold, surveys, and searches, or euphoria across leverage, flows, IPOs, and memes. The adjustment multiplies. That’s the essence: not just the difference between greed and fear, but the difference weighted by coherence. A fragmented crowd drifts; a coherent one breaks walls.
VPS lives on a continuum. Deep negatives capture stampeding panic, while shallow negatives mark quiet hedging. The middle band is characterised by dead air, positives indicate chasing behaviour, and the upper range glows with mania. When the crowd is off its rocker in joy, margin debt surging, memes flying, and everyone is convinced the sky has no ceiling, that’s not when you double down; that’s when you quietly step off the table and take a heavy slice of money out.
Conclusion
The Joy Indicator and the VPS system aren’t competing tools; they’re complementary. Joy gives you the emotional climate: is the room buzzing with confidence, sliding into worry, or dulled by complacency? VPS goes a step deeper, isolating the directional force: when does scattered noise crystallise into a stampede, and is it fear or euphoria driving it?
Think of it this way: Joy is the thermostat; VPS is the compass. One tells you how hot or cold the crowd feels, the other shows you, which way that heat is about to surge. Layered together inside VMP, they transform raw psychology into a tactical map, helping us identify when a mood is just a passing cloud and when it’s might become a storm.
