← Going Deeper: Intermediate Astrology · lesson 32/38
Imagine you wanted a single number for the mood of the sky on any given day. Not one planet, not one aspect — the whole busy crowd of them, distilled into one figure you could plot as a line and watch rise and fall. That's the idea behind the two best-known tools in financial astrology, and it's a surprisingly elegant one even if you never trade a penny.
Back in 1948, an astrologer named Donald Bradley had a go at exactly this. He took the angles between the traditional planets, gave the "easy" ones (like trines and sextiles) a positive score and the "tense" ones (like squares and oppositions) a negative score, added a nudge for how high or low each planet sat in the sky, and summed the whole lot into one running total. Plot that total day by day and you get a wavy line — his siderograph, sometimes called the Bradley barometer.
The claim was never that the line is the market. It's that its peaks and troughs tend to fall near moments when collective mood turns — and markets are, after all, a giant mood ring for a crowd. Two honest health-warnings come with it, and financial astrologers say them out loud: the line's direction can invert (a peak sometimes lines up with a low, not a high), and in recent decades it has simply missed more often — most likely because computer-driven trading and central-bank money have muffled the "natural" rhythm it was built to catch.
The French astrologer André Barbault took a different, slower measurement. He looked only at the five outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto — and added up how far apart every pair of them was. When they're scattered evenly around the zodiac the number is high; when they bunch together it drops low. A low reading means a "concentrated" sky, and Barbault linked those troughs to times of collective tension and upheaval. The deepest trough of recent memory sat right around 2020, when Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto piled into the same corner of the zodiac.
Here's the honest part, and it matters. Financial astrology is fringe and unproven — even its own textbooks admit there's no known physical mechanism, and that these indicators fail as often as they flatter. Treat the curves as a symbolic weather chart, a way of noticing the rhythm of the planets, not a crystal ball for your savings. It's a fascinating lens on cycles and crowd psychology. It is not — ever — financial or investment advice.