Astrologists.asia

Here’s a nice, round number to get us started on the topic of financial astrology: $700 billion dollars. Write that out in full, and we have: $700,000,000,000. That’s an astronomical number, and it is the sum that the American taxpayer is paying to bail out Wall Street and the banks.

For anyone trading in the stock market, these are tumultuous times. With the market swinging as wildly as it has been, how does one come up with a successful investment and trading strategy?

Stock trading is subject to something that is inherently unpredictable. Despite the assumptions of classical economics that people are rational actors, we have at least 700 billion dollars worth of evidence that they are not. Irrational and fallible people make irrational trading decisions. The consequence is an inherent unpredictability. So can astrology take the unpredictability out of stock trading? One man thinks so: Henry Weingarten, managing director of The Astrologer’s Fund Inc. His futures fund has been in business for 20 years, and is based on three basic market factors: fundamentals, technicals and astrology. “Astrological factors are moving the market,” Mr Weingarten said.

Talking to Investmentnews.com, he explained that they usually do their work in October for the whole year to come. Now I can imagine that having an investment strategy in place a year ahead, and then sticking to it, could make one somewhat resistant to the irrational aspects of trading and investing. Traders trade emotionally, from panic selling to exuburant buying, and the value of a company’s stock can rise and fall depending on the mood of ‘the market’. In these volatile trading conditions, anything that keeps one from being swept along in the panic may be an advantage.

As to whether the position of the moon and the planets really does move the market, I think it more likely that the market moves as an aggregate of rational and irrational decisions of thousands and thousands of fallible traders.

You can learn more about financial astrology here.