(11 January 2025) Financial markets are barometers of collective human sentiment. Prices go up when people are optimistic about the future and prices fall when the mood grows more cautious. According to astrological theory, planetary movements often correlate with the ebb and flow of investor sentiment. Favourable astrological alignments involving benefic planets such as Jupiter can predict price rises, while unfavourable alignments of malefic planets such as Saturn are more often in evidence when stocks decline.
In previous studies, we have seen that some two-planet alignments exhibited small but persistent correlations with changes in stock prices. For examples, recent studies of several Mars alignments all show a distinctly bearish influence. Mars, of course, is considered a malefic planet. In this study, I have chosen to focus on the conjunction of Venus and Saturn. This conjunction may be particularly relevant now since the next one is due on Saturday January 18, 2025. The Venus-Saturn conjunction occurs about once a year, although this can be more frequent in years where Venus has its retrograde cycle. Since Venus moves quickly (approximately 400 degrees of geocentric arc per year) and Saturn very slowly (just 12 degrees of arc per year), the conjunction is actually very short-lived. Using a default 10-degree effective range, this conjunction may only last a week, perhaps less. Hopefully, this study can provide some evidence to determine more precisely the effective range of this conjunction.
Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that this conjunction could be somewhat bearish for sentiment since Saturn is a malefic planet. Even though Venus is a benefic planet, experience suggests that conjunctions between one benefic planet (e.g. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter) and one malefic planet (e.g. Mars, Saturn) will tend to produce negative outcomes. This isn’t always true, of course, but the bias seems borne out from frequent observation. To my knowledge, this assumption has never been subject to a systematic statistical test. But here we can test this hypothesis using the 60-year dataset (1965-2025) from the Trading View website. Parenthetically, we should note that alignments that involve a third planet may be less bearish and could coincide with more positive market outcomes, thus negating the initial bearish influence of the Venus-Saturn conjunction. But in order to keep things simple, we should limit ourselves to the two-planet conjunction of Venus and Saturn in order to better determine its essential influence.
Method
In order to measure the effective range of the conjunction, I recorded the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) at different time intervals before and after the exact conjunction. Somewhat arbitrarily, I recorded the DJIA price 10 days before the exact conjunction, and again 6 days, 4 days and 2 days before. My assumption here is that the rapid velocity of Venus meant that the effect before 10-day window would be minimal. Similarly, I recorded the closing price at specific intervals following the exact conjunction — 2 days after, 4 days after, 6 days after and 10 days after. According to Western astrological convention, the period closest to the exact conjunction should show the largest effect — positive or negative. Vedic astrology typically does not make special allowances for degreewise aspects and alignments.
Then I calculated the change in price across all the time intervals. For 61 cases over the past 60 years, I then calculated the average and median for each time interval. The results are in the table below.
Results
What do the data show? The data suggests that the Venus-Saturn conjunction does seem slightly bearish in its effects, although all of the interval effects were less than -1.0%. Most of the time intervals tested produced averaged negative results, although the medians were more mixed. To calculate the "effect size", the average value of the column time interval was subtracted from the expected value. The expected value was calculated based on a conventional long term average annual stock market return of 7.2%. So not only did most intervals have a negative average outcome, but the effect size of all intervals were negative compared with the prorated long term average annual return.
The data also show that the strongest negative effects occurred closer to the date of the exact conjunction. The period from 4 to 6 days before until 4 to 6 days after were a bit more negative. To be sure, these effects were not that much stronger than longer time intervals (e.g. from 10 days before to 10 days after), but the effect sizes were larger.
While the Venus-Saturn conjunction does seem to have a negative impact on sentiment, our data also show that this effect is very modest indeed. Even in the narrow 8-day window straddling the conjunction, the average price effect was less than 0.5%. By itself, this would be a difficult to make practical use of in trading. But it could be useful in combination with other simultaneous alignments.
Outlook for the Venus-Saturn conjunction on January 18
The upcoming Venus-Saturn conjunction on January 18 should be considered as a negative influence in the coming week. Markets have already declined since their mid-December high, loosely coinciding with the Jupiter-Saturn square. The negative influence of this Venus-Saturn conjunction suggests that further declines are possible, everything else being equal. However, we should note the presence of a potentially positive third planet to the negative Venus-Saturn conjunction since Mercury (21 Sagittarius) will form a 60-degree alignment to the conjunction at 21 Aquarius. One caveat to the possible positive influence of this three-planet alignment is that it will be exact on Saturday when markets are closed.
One obvious additional factor this week could be the Sun-Mars opposition that is exact on Wednesday. This is another modestly bearish alignment which could increase the negative burden on investor sentiment. And uncertainty surrounding the approaching Trump inauguration on January 20 is another wild card, although its effects are harder to quantify.
