Trading by Astrology: When the Market Waits for Permission from the Planets
There are many ways to analyze financial markets. Some traders study price charts, some analyze trading volume, others follow economic news and central bank decisions, while a certain group prefers to look somewhere a little farther away before opening a trade.
Not to check the weather.
To see what Mars thinks about Bitcoin today.
This approach is known as Astrology Trading—a method that attempts to identify suitable times to buy or sell financial assets by examining planetary positions, lunar cycles, astrological aspects, and other celestial events.
Of course, there is one fairly important question:
Why should price movements in financial markets have anything to do with planets millions of kilometers away?
Apparently, however, knowing the answer is not particularly important when building a trading strategy.
What really matters is that Saturn is in the right house.
Market Analysis: From Candles to the Cosmos
When an ordinary trader wants to analyze the market, they will probably open a chart.
They will look for support and resistance, identify the trend, check the volume, perhaps add a few indicators, and eventually try to make a decision based on the information available.
It sounds exhausting.
Fortunately, an astrology trader doesn’t necessarily have to put themselves through all that trouble.
They can go straight to the root of the problem:
The planets.
Why did Bitcoin rise 8% today?
Perhaps demand increased. Maybe liquidity entered the market. Perhaps some positive news was released.
Or maybe Jupiter entered a particular aspect.
In fact, if technical analysis fails to explain a market move, there is still one remarkably powerful option available:
The sky.
A Buy Signal from Mars
One of the most fascinating parts of Astrology Trading is the search for relationships between market movements and the positions of celestial bodies.
Suppose a trader discovers that whenever two particular planets form a specific aspect, the price of an asset tends to rise.
Exciting.
Let’s say that out of the last 30 occurrences, the market went up 18 times afterward.
18 out of 30.
That certainly sounds promising.
Of course, that’s assuming we don’t pay too much attention to the other 12.
The trader can now confidently say:
“This pattern has led to a market rise 60% of the time.”
And just like that, a simple astronomical event has been transformed into a trading strategy with a 60% win rate.
There is, however, one tiny problem.
If we run the same experiment across dozens of planets, hundreds of possible aspects, multiple timeframes, and a large number of assets, we are bound to find a few interesting relationships eventually.
It’s a bit like putting a monkey in front of a keyboard and, after it happens to type an English word, announcing:
“A promising new talent in English literature has been discovered.”
Full Moon: Friend or Foe?
The Moon also plays an important role in this story.
Full moons, new moons, and other phases of the lunar cycle can be treated as significant timing points in certain astrological approaches.
For example, if the market has changed direction several times around a full moon, one might conclude that the Moon is probably having some influence on market behavior.
If the market goes up, the Moon had an effect.
If it goes down, the Moon still had an effect.
And if nothing happens?
Well, perhaps the Moon simply decided not to interfere this time.
This is one of the charming features of such theories:
Almost nothing can completely disprove them.
If the prediction is correct, the planets did their job.
If it’s wrong, perhaps another planet should have been taken into account.
And if the market does the exact opposite of what was expected, perhaps the problem was that we didn’t have the market’s exact birth time.
Where Should We Place the Stop Loss?
In a conventional trading strategy, determining the stop loss is a reasonably important matter.
A trader might use support and resistance, market structure, ATR, or volatility to determine where the trade should be invalidated.
But why make things so complicated?
If the entry is based on planetary positions, perhaps the stop loss should follow the same logic.
For example:
“Saturn enters a sensitive position on the 25th, so the market probably shouldn’t move beyond this level before then.”
What if price hits the stop loss?
No problem.
Perhaps Saturn changed its position slightly earlier than expected.
What if price goes straight to the target?
Excellent.
The astrological prediction was obviously correct.
And what if the market hits neither the stop loss nor the target?
There is probably a new celestial event on the way.
Which means even a sideways market can somehow become useful to the theory.
Backtesting: When the Sky Has to Show Its Work
Of course, there is one small problem.
If we want to examine Astrology Trading as a serious trading method, we need to backtest it.
And this is where the story suddenly becomes less poetic.
We can no longer simply say:
“When cosmic energy increases, the market becomes more likely to rise.”
We have to answer a few rather inconvenient questions.
What exactly is cosmic energy?
Which energy?
How much?
On what date?
Which planet?
Which aspect?
When exactly do we enter?
When do we exit?
Where is the stop loss?
If these questions cannot be answered precisely, then we are not really dealing with a trading strategy.
We are dealing with a beautifully written piece about the sky.
And once the rules have been clearly defined, we reach the even more interesting part:
Testing them on data the strategy has never seen before.
Because a strategy can look absolutely brilliant when tested on the past and do almost nothing when faced with the future.
At that point, of course, there are always ways to fine-tune the celestial parameters.
Change the aspect.
Add another planet.
Adjust the time window.
Change the timeframe.
And if nothing works, perhaps the market simply hasn’t aligned with our chosen star yet.
The Great Advantage of Astrology: There Is Always an Explanation
One of the remarkable strengths of Astrology Trading is its extraordinary ability to explain what happened in the past.
Suppose we predicted that the market would rise, but it crashed instead.
Don’t worry.
Mercury was probably in an unfavorable position.
Or perhaps we interpreted Mars incorrectly.
Maybe the Moon was in an unexpected phase.
Or perhaps Jupiter should have been included in the calculation.
And just like that, even when the prediction is wrong, the theory can remain alive.
This is a valuable feature in financial markets.
Some trading systems are forced to reconsider themselves after repeated failures.
A sufficiently flexible system, however, can provide a cosmic explanation for almost any outcome.
Market went up? The planets.
Market went down? The planets.
Market moved sideways? Still the planets.
We just need to figure out which one.
The Little Problem Called Cause and Effect
Now, let’s be serious for a moment.
If we notice that two things happened at the same time, can we conclude that one caused the other?
For example, suppose every time a particular planet was in a certain position, the price of gold also went up.
Does that mean the planet caused gold to rise?
Not necessarily.
The correlation could be completely coincidental.
Financial markets are influenced by an enormous number of factors at any given moment—from interest rates and inflation to political news, liquidity, investor behavior, and countless other variables.
With that many variables moving simultaneously, finding two events that occasionally occur together isn’t particularly difficult.
Especially if we look at the outcome first and then search for an explanation.
This is the moment when a trader might look at the chart and proudly say:
“See? Exactly as the planets predicted!”
While the planets themselves are probably completely unaware that we are trading.
But What If It Actually Works?
To be fair, not everything that sounds unusual or scientifically questionable is automatically worthless.
If someone develops an astrological trading system with clearly defined rules, and that system produces meaningful results through proper statistical testing, robust backtesting, and out-of-sample validation, then naturally, it deserves further investigation.
The market doesn’t care where a signal came from.
If a method genuinely produces a persistent statistical edge, the source of that edge is ultimately less important than the evidence supporting it.
The problem begins when we stop testing a hypothesis and start looking for ways to confirm it.
If the prediction is correct, record it.
If it’s wrong, find a new explanation.
If it’s wrong again, adjust the parameters.
And eventually, after 47 rounds of optimization, we may end up with a strategy that performs remarkably well on those same 47 historical trades.
Then, with complete confidence, we can announce:
“This system has been historically proven.”
The market, meanwhile, is probably sitting quietly in the corner, smiling.
Conclusion: Maybe Check the Chart Before Checking the Sky
Astrology Trading is certainly one of the more unusual approaches to financial market analysis. Instead of focusing exclusively on price and trader behavior, it directs part of its attention toward the Moon, planets, and celestial events.
Its supporters may believe that astronomical cycles can help identify important periods in the market.
Maybe they can.
But there is a relatively simple way to find out:
Data.
Not success stories.
Not charts selected after the fact.
Not predictions reinterpreted once the outcome is already known.
A precise system. Clear rules. Independent testing.
If it works, great.
Then we can look at the chart with confidence and say:
“Apparently, Saturn really did its job this time.”
Until then, however, it might be wise to do something remarkably unconventional before checking the positions of Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and the Moon:
Take a quick look at the actual price chart.
Because ultimately, the reason an asset fell 20% might be much simpler than an astronomical aspect.
For example There might have been a seller.
