← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 227/235
Financial astrology
First, a plain caveat
Financial astrology is a speculative and much-disputed corner of the art, questioned by many astrologers as well as by everyone else. Nothing in this entry, or in any reading here, is financial or investment advice. Prices are moved by economies, interest rates, earnings and the hopes and fears of millions of people. Treat what follows as heritage and symbolism; for decisions about money, consult a qualified financial adviser.
What it is
Financial astrology, also called business or market astrology, relates the movements of the planets to economic life: booms and slumps, the fortunes of companies and currencies, and the rhythms of markets. It grew out of mundane astrology, which reads the sky over nations and eras, and it works at two quite different scales.
The long cycles
At the broad end, astrologers read the slow planetary cycles as backdrops to economic eras. The twenty-year meeting of Jupiter and Saturn — expansion meeting contraction — has long been taken as a marker of economic and political epochs. Louise McWhirter, in 1938, tied the business cycle to the Moon's North Node and its circuit of about 18.6 years. André Barbault's cyclic index, which adds up the distances between the outer planets, is read as a gauge of overall world tension, and its low points are often set beside periods of economic strain.
The market-timing tradition
At the bolder end, some have tried to time the turns of particular markets.
- W. D. Gann (1878–1955), an American trader, built methods on time cycles, geometry and angles, and is often counted among financial astrologers, though how much of his work was astrological in a strict sense is argued over.
- Donald Bradley, in Stock Market Prediction (1948), proposed the siderograph: a single curve made by adding up the aspects between the planets — the harmonious ones counted as positive, the hard ones as negative — with a term for the planets' declinations. He offered it as a picture of the general "weather" of mass mood, with its turning points of interest more than its height. Writers who use it today, such as Larry Pesavento, note that it has missed as often as it has seemed to hit.
- Others read a company's or a stock exchange's founding chart, or, in a personal chart, the second house (one's own resources) and the eighth (shared money, debts and other people's resources).
How it is read
Its practitioners read it as a description of the climate in which people act, not a signal to act on, and they are careful never to give trading advice. It is a specialist branch, best met once the basics are in hand: the oldest symbolic system turned on one of the most uncertain parts of modern life.
In a reading here
Some news readings here include a "market weather" chart. It draws a curve after Bradley's method — the weights are a reconstruction of his scheme, not his own published figures — beside the Barbault cyclic index. It is shown as an illustration of planetary patterns over time. It does not predict markets and is not advice.