(2 August 2026) Stocks finished higher last week despite some volatility brought on by renewed hostilities between the US and Iran and another spike in oil prices. Despite the inflationary threat posed by higher oil prices, the Fed opted to leave interest rates unchanged.
The positive weekly outcome was somewhat unexpected as I thought we might have seen a bit more downside from the double station near-square of Mercury and Saturn (July 23 and July 26) as well as the semisquare of Saturn and the North Lunar Node on July 30. Our backtests of these patterns showed a strong bearish bias, especially in the days following the stations.
For the 45-degree semisquare of Saturn and the North Node, the updated cumulative charts below suggest that the potential fallout from the current alignment has been earlier than the post-alignment period in which the mean and median dip below the zero line. In that sample of 27 cases, the negative effects are typically after the exact semisquare which in the current case occurred July 30. The early bearishness roughly matches the scale of the average decline although it has been pulled forward in time almost a full month. It is impossible to say if this effect has simply manifested early due to other concurrent alignments or if we will see more downside in August.
It is a similar story in the narrower sample of 4 cases in which the Saturn-North Node semisquare is limited to instances in which Saturn is retrograde as in the current alignment. Is the meat of the decline yet to come in August or has its effects come early due to other factors? Again, this question is unanswerable. However, it is possible we can expect some mean reversion to take place and for the price changes from the current alignment (red line) to rise towards the long term mean and median.
Last week’s volatility also manifested earlier than we might expect given the near-square alignment of stationary Mercury and stationary Saturn. The prices associated with the current alignment (red line) have dipped well below this pattern’s mean and median. While only consisting of 6 previous cases, the specificity of this pattern may mean that it is more directly analogous to the current alignment than would otherwise by the case. In other words, what is loses in its small sample size, it gains in its closer analog. On the whole, Mercury-Saturn squares are only marginally bearish (<-0.5%) but become more bearish when Mercury stations direct at the end of its retrograde station. The bearish effect is further increased when Saturn is also stationing retrograde. In that double station near-square scenario (n=3), the average decline is close to -6% peak-to-trough.
To read the rest of this post, please visit my Empirical Astrology Substack
