Stock market astrology: what financial astrologers calculate and what holds

Hardly any branch of astrology promises as much as this one: anyone who knew when gold was about to rise and when a market was about to turn would be set for life. What gets calculated here is remarkably solid — and that is exactly why it is possible to say where the arithmetic stops carrying weight.

What this branch works with

Your own birth chart plays no part here. Three things go into the calculation.

• The chart of a company or of an exchange, drawn for the act of incorporation or for the minute of the first trade.
• The orbits of the slow planets, laid over a run of prices in the expectation that highs and lows will line up with them.
• The calendar of recurring positions: Mercury retrograde, new moons, eclipses. These dates are fixed decades ahead, which is what makes them such welcome pegs.

This branch has one advantage over the rest: its raw material is clean. Registration, flotation and first quoted price are recorded to the minute, and the run of prices has come down unbroken. Nobody here can plead uncertain data.

Gold belongs to the Sun — where the saying comes from

A commodity has no founding day. So that gold can be treated astrologically all the same, an old correspondence is brought in: each of the seven classical metals belongs to one of the seven wandering stars. Gold to the Sun, silver to the Moon, quicksilver to Mercury, copper to Venus, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn. Alchemy made the series a fixed part of its repertoire; there the same sign often stood for the metal and for the planet.

As an ordering of images it holds together: shine, permanence and warmth do belong with one another, and anyone who knows the planets sees at once why these pairs were formed. But no road leads from there to a number. What the gold price does hangs on interest rates, exchange rates, the buying of central banks and on how nervous investors happen to be. The position of the Sun is none of those quantities.

What goes wrong when the figures are checked

Saturn takes just under thirty years for its round of the Sun, Jupiter not quite twelve. Their meeting in the sky occurs about five times in a hundred years. Anyone who ties it to economic crises therefore has five cases to hand for a whole century of price history. From five cases a good deal can be told and nothing proved.

On top of that comes a snag that has nothing to do with the sky at all: a price is always a ratio. Gold is usually quoted in dollars — if the dollar gives way, the gold price rises without anything about the gold having changed. Anyone checking a forecast must therefore know first what it was reckoned in; in euros the same move often looks quite different.

The market is not a celestial body

Planetary positions can be worked out centuries ahead because nobody influences them. A price comes about differently. It is the result of decisions, and decisions change as soon as those taking part learn something new — a published forecast included.

From this follows a difficulty this branch shares with every market forecast: were a forecast reliable and public on top of that, enough people would trade on it to use up the advantage before the announced date arrived. What works reliably is rarely sold. It is used.

And one hurdle more: over long periods, broad equity markets have risen more often than they have fallen. Anyone betting on rising prices is therefore often right without having known anything. A forecast shows something only once it beats that standing finding.

And your money

In Germany, investment advice is a licensed business with obligations and liability. An astrological market commentary is not that, and is no substitute for it. Anyone staking money that will be needed next year carries the risk alone.

That leaves the question of why this branch draws people so. Probably because prices are uncertain and uncertainty is hard to bear. A rule, even a borrowed one, feels better than no rule at all. You can see how astrology otherwise handles stretches of time in the horoscopes.