(5 October 2025) US stocks finished the week higher yet again on hopes that further rate cuts would keep the AI-driven economic expansion going a while longer. This seemingly unstoppable rally has taken the major indexes to a series of record highs following April’s tariff tantrum. The gains came despite some potential planetary red flags as last Friday’s Venus-South Node conjunction (Oct 3-4) had a modest bearish bias, even if there is still time left this week to fully manifest.
These days most modestly bearish aspects have had little effect on the market as the ongoing bullish alignment of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto shows no sign of weakening. It is possible there could be a sentiment shift after Pluto’s direct station on October 14 as this will mark the beginning of a separation of these three outer planets.
More immediately, the markets this week could be subject to the influence of Venus. There are two significant Venus placements to consider: 1) Venus enters sidereal Virgo on Wednesday, October 8 and 2) Venus opposes Saturn on Saturday October 11. While Venus is usually thought of as bullish planet, these two placements look more difficult. Venus is considered debilitated or fallen in the sign of Virgo where it is less able to deliver its typical positive outcomes. Secondly, any alignments with Saturn carry a certain downside risk, even if Saturn’s bearish reputation isn’t always justified. Let’s look at both of these influences in turn.
Venus in Virgo: tropical vs sidereal
As the planet of happiness, luxury and all things valuable, Venus is considered a benefic planet for financial markets. When it is strong and in soft alignment with most other planets, asset prices are more likely to rise. But like all planets, Venus becomes vulnerable when it is weak and afflicted, e.g.it is aspected by malefic planets or in “bad” signs and houses. One such bad sign is Virgo, its sign of debilitation. In an individual horoscope, a debilitated Venus is said to delay or disrupt the love life in some way. In financial markets, there is a commonly-held view that sentiment suffers during its transit of Virgo.. But is this actually true?
Before we can answer that question, we should clarify which Virgo we mean — tropical or sidereal. As with most practitioners of Vedic astrology, I mostly follow the sidereal zodiac using the Lahiri or Krishnamurti ayanamsha. This is currently about 24 degrees behind the tropical zodiac . The tropical zodiac has a virtual monopoly on Western astrology, although there is a small but dedicated group of Western siderealists who follow the work of Cyril Fagan and Donald Bradley. In any event, this 24 degree difference in planetary placements complicates research efforts as it means that both zodiacal positions should be considered in any query relating to signs. So if we want to see what effect the transit of Venus in Virgo will have on the stock market, we have to test both transits. For the record, Venus enters sidereal Virgo (Lahiri) on October 8 and will leave it on November 2,, while Venus has already entered tropical Virgo back on September 19 and will leave it and enter Libra on October 13.
The debate between adherents of the two zodiacs goes back centuries and I have no intention of settling it here. Both sides have reasonable a priori arguments with tropicalists insisting on the spring equinox as their 0° Aries point while the siderealists assert the unchanging fixed star point of reference, such as Spica at 0° Libra. Given the intractable nature of the zodiacal debate, it seems obvious that the best way to empirically examine the bearish assertions about Venus in Virgo is to put both zodiacs to the test. What is the performance of stocks when Venus is in tropical Virgo compared to its transit through sidereal Virgo about three weeks later?
Method
It takes Venus about four weeks to fully transit through the sign of Virgo in either zodiac. Depending on the orbital speed of Venus, this can take as little as 24 days or as long as 30 days and occasionally even longer if it is retrograde. In order to determine the price changes while Venus was in Virgo, prices were recorded 12 days prior to the entry of Venus into Virgo, and then 8 days prior and so on every 4 days until Venus has exited Virgo. The last price observation was 12 days after Venus had exited Virgo and entered Libra.
One problem with using these fixed intervals is that the Venus transit through Virgo has varying lengths. As a workaround, I used 4 days for all intervals except for the last one before Venus exits Virgo. Therefore the interval “20d1 0d2” (i.e. the price change from 20 days after the entry into Virgo until the day Venus exited Virgo) was actually of variable length of between 4 and 10 days. For the current transit of Venus through tropical Virgo, this flexible interval equates to Oct 5 to Oct 13. This varying length interval only created issues in the expected values. With the average annual rate of return at 8.8% from 1990 to 2024, I had to estimate the length of that single interval using a 6-day average instead of 4-days.. This shows up as a slight bend in the expected value line in the cumulative chart (see below) instead of the usual fixed straight line.
Results: Venus in tropical Virgo
Looking at the transit of Venus through tropical Virgo, the chart below shows the closing prices of the S&P 500 across that entire 50-day window — a 12-day approach period, an average 26-day transit through Virgo and a 12-day post-Virgo period. As a reminder, Venus is currently in tropical Virgo — it entered on Sep 19 — and we have seen markets generally extend their summer rally. Venus is due to leave tropical Virgo and enter Libra on Oct 13.
But as the summary statistics show (see table below), there isn’t much of an effect from this transit. Average and medians generally follow the expected values as it slowly rises through the transition from Virgo to Libra. Interestingly, there was one statistically significant result, although ironically it was opposite to our bearish hypothesis: prices rose sharply during the pre-Virgo period (i.e. Venus in Leo) especially between 15-days and 12-days before the entry into Virgo. But the actual transit of tropical Virgo did not show much divergence from what chance would expect.
So is Venus in tropical Virgo bearish? No, there is no evidence for that. Its transit in the second half of Leo is somewhat bullish, however, so that deserves further study. But the cumulative trend chart below tracks price changes during the course of the transit seems a bit bullish more than bearish, especially if we focus on the median outcome. While 39 cases is too small a study to make any definitive claims, there isn’t any support for the bearish thesis for tropical Virgo.
Venus in sidereal Virgo
If tropical Virgo didn’t yield any strong results, the Venus transit through sidereal Virgo looks a bit more compelling. The table below shows the closing prices for the years 1990-2025 across 35 cases. There are four fewer cases than the tropical transit in Virgo because Venus tends to turn retrograde in tropical Leo and Virgo but not in sidereal Virgo.
The summary statistics table below hints at some bearishness during the middle part of the Venus transit through sidereal Virgo. Thus, the intervals of “0d1 16d” and “0d1 20d” produced negative outcomes for both the average and the medians. Prices then recovered by the exit of Venus from sidereal Virgo at “0d1 0d2”. Prices then continued to have a bullish bias after its exit from Virgo. It is important to note, however, that none of these results were significant. Despite the tantalizing negative intervals which would confirm our bearish thesis, this is still a very weak effect that may or may not hold up in a larger sample.
The chart below highlights this negative dip in the middle of the Virgo transit. For the current transit of Venus in sidereal Virgo, the point of maximum bearishness would be 16 days after Oct 8, which equates to Oct 24. This is, of course, just an average and should not be assumed to have any predictive value. But it is certainly worth monitoring market developments as we enter the Venus in sidereal Virgo period on Oct 8.
Venus-180-Saturn
The other potentially important condition affecting Venus this week is its opposition with Saturn. This is exact on Saturday, Oct 11. This is also a potentially negative influence due to the common belief that Saturn is a malefic planet. Its hard aspects with benefics like Venus are therefore seen as vulnerable to declines. But is this historically the case?
The table below shows closing prices on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) around the time of the Venus-Saturn opposition. Since this opposition occurs about once per year, I compiled a dataset of 55 cases from 1970 to 2025. Prices were recorded at 3-day intervals starting at 15 days prior to the opposition and continuing until 15 days after the exact opposition.
The summary statistics table below shows the modest negative impact of this opposition. The first interval (“-12d”) represents the price change between 15 days prior to the opposition until 12 days prior. The second interval (“-9d”) indicates the percentage change in prices from initial reference point 15 days prior until 9 days prior, and so on. While the effect is small and brief, both the average and median dip below the expected value line and into negative territory at the “3d” mark — 3 days after the exact Venus-Saturn opposition. The average quickly recovers and tracks the expected value higher as the opposition separates at “12d” and “15d”. However, it is important to note that none of these results were statistically significant despite a fairly sizable sample of 55 cases.
This dip shortly after the exact opposition is clearly shown in the cumulative trend chart below. If this pattern were to repeat with the current Venus-Saturn opposition, the low point would occur 3 days after on or around October 14. But without statistical significance or even a very strong effect, this date projection is very speculative and should be taken with a suitcase of salt.
Double trouble: Venus under pressure
Since both of these Venus conditions have a bearish lean, what happens if we combine them? The Venus-Saturn opposition means that we had to find cases when Saturn was transiting through Pisces — the sign opposite Virgo. Since this only happens once every 29 years, the sample size was very limited. As a result, I could only compile a tiny sample of 9 cases dating back to 1907 in which Venus was in sidereal Virgo and opposite Saturn. These cases and the closing prices are shown in the table below. In order to expand the time window a bit as a way to partially compensate for the small sample size, I used a longer 42-day window that began 21 days before the Venus-Saturn opposition and ended 21 days after.
The chart below shows the cumulative trend for this combination of factors. It’s obviously quite bearish as both the average and median lines sink well below zero as well as the expected value line. To be clear, it was not necessary that Venus should be in sidereal Virgo for the entire 42-day span; only that it is in Virgo at the time of the Venus-Saturn opposition.
Overall, this combination of bearish factors seems to magnify the negative effects of each individual factor creating a more potent pairing. The most bearish period in this chart is from 3 days before the opposition (“-3d”) until perhaps 6 days after (“6d”). In the current context of the Oct 11 Venus-Saturn opposition, this would equate to a bearish period from Oct 8 until Oct 17. However, here again none of the results reached statistical significance (i.e. p<0.05), no doubt because there were only 9 cases. The strongest effect occurred at 3 days before the exact opposition (“-3d”) which had an average of -1.81%, a standard deviation of 4.19% and an expected value of 0.27%. This produced a p-value of 0.174 — well above the 0.05 needed for statistical significance. The sample size would have to at least double to 18 in order to reach that significance level. Unfortunately, the Trading View data only goes back to 1896 and thus precludes adding any additional cases.
Implications for this week
The combined effects of these factors would seem to increase the probability of some downside this week and next. Of course, the small sample size and lack of significance reduces the confidence of this prediction. I would therefore be reluctant to make any forecasts on the basis of these studies alone. But given how overbought the market already is, there is a very plausible set up for a pullback here given the weakened state of Venus, especially after October 8 when it enters sidereal Virgo.
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Disclaimer: Not intended as investment advice. For educational purposes only.
