(27 Sep 2026) Stocks moved higher last week as oil prices fell on hopes that the Strait of Hormuz may soon reopen. The Nasdaq rose 3% on the week while the S&P 500 and Dow enjoyed smaller gains. Small caps and the broader market indexes were actually lower, however, continuing the trend of negative market breadth that began in August.
The mostly positive weekly outcome was in line with expectations given the ongoing current alignments. While the approaching Venus retrograde station on Oct 3 may elevate downside risk, we noted that several alignments were well below their historical price norms and were likely to experience some positive mean reversion.
This was especially true for the transit of Venus through sidereal Libra. While usually bullish, the current transit of Venus in sidereal Libra since Sep 2 had seen relative underperformance of the S&P 500 (SPX). The updated chart below shows that this divergence has largely resolved as the current transit (red line) is now approaching the mean and median. But with the end of the 48-day backtest period on Sep 26, this influence will now drop off the list of current alignments. Venus will remain in sidereal Libra through October and November due to its retrograde cycle but it is unknown if its bullish influence will continue to manifest while in backwards motion.
Another underperforming alignment may have also reverted to its historical mean last week as seen in the updated heliocentric tertiary progressed alignment of Mercury and Venus. Actually, it seems that the underperformance of a typically bullish alignment was the result of using the Dow Jones Industrial Average rather than the S&P 500. The Dow has been lagging the other indexes recently as the orange line (Current DJIA) closed this week below its level from late July at the start of the backtest period. There is no such underperformance in the SPX, however, which is largely tracking the bullish mean and median lines and posted an almost 5% gain since late July.
While I used the Dow in the original statistical analysis of the alignment, I think a case can be made for including the S&P 500 here. Just as the Dow was the most widely-known and representative stock index for most of the 20th century, the S&P 500 has largely supplanted it since the 1980s and 1990s. The Dow is still 95% correlated to the S&P 500 over the medium term but the two indexes can diverge significantly over shorter time periods.
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