Astrology guides some financial traders
New York is full of people who make big decisions about billions of dollars. To the person on the street, these decisions look rational, like something that’s part of a bigger plan.
But the course of true investing never did run smooth, and there are some traders who look to the stars to tell them what to do. Financial astrologers like Karen Starich say traders know they’re up against a lot of rich, smart people.
“They want to have that edge,” she says. “They want to know what the future is.”
Starich chargest $237 annually for her newsletter, which 300 traders subscribe to for news of what will happen to the stock prices of companies, or even bigger, to the Federal Reserve. She sees dark times ahead in the Fed’s horoscope.
“They now have Saturn squared to Neptune, which is really bankruptcy,” Starich explains.
Neptune represents money. But when Saturn shows up in a chart, it indicates restriction. So for the Fed, that means the “fiscal cliff is here, and there’s no place to go except to print more money or unravel these financial institutions,” Starich says.
Of course, a lot of Wall Street traders, and others, don’t want it to be known that they’re relying on anything other than their own talent. Arch Crawford, a financial astrologer who actually got his start on Wall Street as a stock analyst at Merrill Lynch, recalls one subscriber asking for his newsletter in “brown paper wrappers.”
Crawford warns his 2,000 subscribers particularly against the dangers of Mercury in retrograde, a time when the planet appears to be going in reverse across the sky. The phenomenon, which happens three times or more a year, indicates a month when communications will be screwed up. He warns his subscribers never to start anything new during that time. He points to the fact that Knight Capital launched a new software program in August, when Mercury was in retrograde, and the brokerage firm nearly went out of business. He also notes that most major market glitches have happened while Mercury was in retrograde.
Coincidence? Most people would say yes. Financial astrologers don’t say they have all the answers. They say instead that they see a range of possibilities. Human action can change them. As Shakespeare once wrote, “our faults lie not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
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