(24 May 2026) US stocks continued their powerful rally last week as strong Nvidia earnings and renewed hopes for a peace deal with Iran pushed the S&P 500 higher for the eighth straight week. Crude oil fell sharply closing under $100 and took the pressure off Treasury yields as bonds followed stocks higher.
The positive week was in keeping with our overall expectations given the bullish bias of the approaching Mars-Pluto square on May 25 and the broader Mars-Pluto-North Node alignment. Last week’s backtest study suggested that both alignments had a bullish bias and several of the tested time intervals reached statistical significance (p < 0.05).
The updated cumulative trend chart for the Mars-90-Pluto square (n=27) shows prices generally tracking the mean and median lines higher, albeit with a normal amount of choppiness. Of course even a strong bullish bias in past squares is no guarantee that stocks will rise through the course of the current square. Every case is unique and has distinctive co-factors which can determine the eventual path of stock prices apart from any historical mean. But the fact that previous squares corresponded with higher stock prices well after the exact 90-degree square is still useful information. The Mars-Pluto square is therefore clearly a tailwind for stocks at least until the end of the backtest period (“15d”) which equates to June 9 for the current alignment…
To read the rest of this post, please visit my Empirical Astrology Substack


