Can I Use Astrology to Play the Stock Market?

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images

Oscar Thaw, a 24-year-old crypto day trader who calls himself “Doctor Racso,” claims to have turned $40,000 into half a million dollars in only ten days through “trading charts” and astrology. Alas, as he told YouTuber Caleb Hammer, he then lost almost all of it on the market. “I made the money because I was a good astrologer, but I lost the money because I was a bad trader,” he said. Thaw used astrology, he tells me, to look for “signals” for when the stock market would shift. “Only then I decided to gamble because I was so excited,” he says. “I felt like if I can predict the market, then I’m basically a god.”

Thaw isn’t alone in looking to the cosmos for help trading stocks. Increasingly, astrology, once reserved for the backpages of women’s magazines, has become a tool for beginner traders to make sense of the stock market, giving people the edge (or at least the feeling of one) they need to be confident when buying and selling. There are the TikTok influencers claiming to have made a 21 percent return in eight minutes by trusting their “higher self,” the astrologers on YouTube making financial predictions, mediums on Instagram offering livestreamed “astrology money sessions,” and Redditors looking for astrological stock-market predictions from fellow commenters. Work-focused astrology tools like Bizmos, a business astrology calendar from Los Angeles–based astrologer Ryan Marquardt, have also emerged in recent years, and financial-astrology experts like Bill Meridian, author of Planetary Stock Trading and The Predictive Power of Eclipse Paths, and Norm Winski, who has a monthly “Astro-Trend” astrological and technical analysis forecast covering about 30 futures markets, are being called “legends” on financial YouTube accounts.

Of course, none of this is new  — even J.P. Morgan is said to have, according to many spiritual circles, used astrology to amass his billions. He’s often alleged to have said: “Millionaires don’t need astrologers, but billionaires do.” He didn’t actually say that, apparently, but still.

Financial astrologer Susan Gidel has been working with traders and businesses for over ten years. Using astrology to make investments, she says, is not dissimilar to dissecting your birth chart. “When markets start trading, it’s called a first trade chart, so it’s like their birthday,” Gidel explains. “Just like you do when looking at your chart, it seems like there are tendencies at big market turn highs or lows that the planets are involved consistently.” Gidel releases a trading days newsletter for $12 a month covering the markets she watches closely from an astrological lens, including the S&P 500 and bitcoin. She says the recently transiting Saturn being conjunct with the sun of the S&P 500 index happens only once every 29 years and has historically tended to be a sign of a market high. “I strongly believe astrology is just an ancillary to whatever else you might choose to make financial-investment decisions,” she says. “But I do think it’s superior in terms of the timing to do something.”

But while the practice may not be new, it is reaching new audiences. It all began in 2021 during the crypto boom, when the total value of all cryptocurrencies surpassed $3 trillion. Back then, one of the most prominent astrological traders was internet personality Maren Altman, who taught her followers (1 million on TikTok alone) how to trade according to the moon. At the time, with bitcoin surging by 300 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, Altman says her followers were more than willing to put their spare government stimulus money into day trading — until the stimulus checks stopped. For her part, Altman says she no longer uses astrology for trading despite still considering it a “valid tool” for investing. “I didn’t mean to find anything financial,” she says. “I was most heavily involved when everyone else was because there was just more liquidity in there; with the government stimulus checks, 19-year-old kids were asking, ‘Where do I put this?’” Despite making money during that time, Altman had difficulties executing the trades. “I was in over my head, and I figured I was okay with making significantly less money because it can be a lot of trouble,” she says.

Through astrology, Gidel says she’s come to think of markets and businesses as individuals. “In my head, they just become another person,” she says. With this in mind, she often compares the chart of a business with one of her clients to give them personalized trading advice. “What I want to see when comparing traders’ charts is how their personal sun and moon relates to that business chart,” she says. “In an ideal world, I want to see both connected to each other’s chart in some meaningful way.” (Though, she points out,  she doesn’t present herself as a financial adviser.) According to Gidel, there are long-term economic cycles that usually involve the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, which “match up nicely” with the Dow Jones industrial average. She also uses these cycles to make decisions with her financial adviser, factoring in her long-term prediction for substantial inflation through the end of the decade, before a huge low coming in 2032 based on the Saturn-Uranus cycle. “Knowing that helps set up my portfolio for protection against a potential drop,” she says.

The CFA Institute, a global not-for-profit organization that provides finance education for investment professionals, says risky investments and short-term trading are often likened to gambling. As people claim they’ve “figured out” the market, we’re reminded of how easy it is to fall into the idea of get-rich-quick schemes. Even Thaw, who once was considered a financial success story, says he doesn’t believe astrology should be used to make money. Instead, he says, “it’s a tool for healing.” Others in the financial-astrology business still promote the use of the practice, just alongside the knowledge of a registered investment adviser. But rogue traders like Thaw have instead gained a following from rolling the dice. “We’re just humans making bets every day,” he says. “The whole world is a gain, and America’s complete stock market is just a casino.”