(12 April 2025)  After a wild week, US stocks finished higher as US President Donald Trump assuaged jittery markets with a 90-day pause of his controversial reciprocal tariff regime.  Despite worldwide anger and disbelief at the tariffs, Trump finally relented only after yields started spiking in the bond market.  While bonds are normally safe havens during stock declines, bonds also sold off after Liberation Day on April 2 reflecting either capital flight from the US or forced hedge fund liquidation as over-leveraged investors got caught on the wrong side of the market.  Rising bond yields are bad news for the US government since $6 Trillion worth of debt will come due by June.  More expensive debt servicing costs will restrict program spending and could force significant cuts, DOGE notwithstanding.

The continued volatility and eventual positive weekly outcome was not too surprising given the ongoing planetary influences.  Last week, I suggested that the end of the Mercury retrograde cycle on Monday, April 7 could coincide with a shift in sentiment.  As it turned out, stocks bottomed that day and gradually rose through the rest of week, albeit with some hair-raising ups and downs along the way.  I also suggested that the tertiary progressed alignments in the NYSE looked quite bullish last week and this week, even if they typically have a fairly wide margin of time error.

So can this fledgling rally continue this week?  I believe it can.  Besides the bullish bias of the Saturn-Rahu conjunction as per our recent study and the favorable NYSE progressions outlook, the NASDAQ natal chart is also looking quite good these days.  The technology-centered NASDAQ exchange was founded on February 8, 1971 with the first trade at 10.00 a.m. EST.  Unlike the NYSE chart which has a range of possible birth times, the data for the NASDAQ chart is more reliable.

One key feature of this chart is that transiting Jupiter, now at 23 Taurus, is casting its full-strength 5th house/120 degree trine aspect to the natal Sun at 25 degrees of Capricorn and 50 minutes. (25Cp50).  Along with the Moon and the Ascendant, the Sun is one of the most important points in the chart.  When it is favorably aspected by a benefic like Jupiter, good things tend to happen.  Jupiter-Sun aspects should therefore be bullish for tech stocks and thus for the US market generally.  Perhaps it is not surprising that Trump exempted mobile phones and computers from tariffs this weekend given this positive influence on the NASDAQ chart.  Mag7 stocks are likely to rally strongly next week.

It is also worth noting that this Jupiter-Sun aspect is exact on April 23, 2025.  Thus, we could see more than just a short-lived bounce this week upcoming since the aspect will be within range for the rest of April.  But just how strong is this alignment?

To find out, I examined all previous alignments of 0, 120, and 240 degrees of Jupiter to the natal Sun at 25Cp50.  Like the current 120 degree alignment, the 240 degree alignment (Jupiter=25 Virgo) should exert a similar positive influence on the Sun.  The conjunction at 25 Capricorn may also be included in this group since it represents the most direct influence of Jupiter upon the natal Sun of the NASDAQ chart.

The results show that the Jupiter-Sun aspects are indeed bullish.  From a modest sample size of 21 cases, all time intervals tested showed a larger than expected result.  (The expected value was based on an average annual return of 7.2%.)  The first column on the left has an average change of 2.06% measured from 20 days before the exact aspect until the day of the exact alignment.(“0d  -20d”).  This was 1.6% above the expected value, equivalent to 0.08% gain per day.  The effect was still fairly modest, however, given that only 62% of cases were positive.

Shorter time intervals showed a somewhat larger effect as the 5-day and 10-day time window straddling the exact aspect had a 0.14% net increase per day.  The longest 40-day time window (“20d  -20d”) has the largest effect at 3.61%, although the net effect per day was smaller at 0.07% per day.  Nonetheless, the effect was consistently positive suggesting that the Jupiter-Sun alignment is in fact a bullish influence on the NASDAQ.

But upon closer inspection, we see that the largest gains occurred with the Jupiter-Sun conjunction  at 25 Capricorn.  Thus, the outsized influence of the gains from May 1997, July 1997 and April 2009 likely skewed the data towards a more bullish outcome than might otherwise be the case.  Does the bullish effect hold when the conjunctions are excluded and we focus only on the 120 and 240 degree alignments?

The bullish effect is still there, although it is much smaller. As the last chart shows, the average across all intervals for those 12 cases is still greater than the long term annualized average.  As in the larger sample, the strongest effects appear to be clustered closer to the exact alignment.  Thus, the 4th column (“5d  -5d”) shows a net gain of 0.11% per day from an average of 1.29% across the 10-day interval. The 5-day window just after the exact 120 or 240 degree alignment (“5d 0d”) had the largest effect size at 0.14% with 75% of cases showing a positive return.

Conclusion

While the effect is quite modest, there is nonetheless a bullish influence when Jupiter aligns with the natal Sun at 25 Capricorn in the NASDAQ horoscope.  Since this 120 degree alignment will be exact on April 23, there is some reason to have a bullish bias as we enter the second half of April.  Along with the other bullish influences from the progressed charts we have already mentioned, it would seem that markets are likely to recover further from its current tariff-induced sell-off.

Transits for week of 14 April 2025

There is a rare five-planet alignment early in the week.  While this centers around the unpredictable Saturn-Rahu conjunction, the inclusion of Venus, Uranus and the Sun tilts the balance towards a more positive outcome.  As my study suggests, the Saturn-Rahu conjunction is only bearish in the days leading up to its exact conjunction, which is on April 14.  Once Saturn moves past Rahu, the outcomes become more positive on average.  With Venus and the Sun also in the first degree of their respective signs, the downside risk is significantly diminished.  And since Venus will be resuming its normal forward motion after completing its retrograde cycle on April 12, Venus may be more bullish than usual.  Uranus at 1 Taurus increases the likelihood of a larger move here, with further gains as the more likely outcome.

The midweek Mercury-Neptune conjunction looks less positive, however, especially given the square with Mars.

The late week lacks clarity as the Moon forms a tense aspect with Saturn on Friday morning.  However, the Venus-Rahu conjunction still seems positive and could offset some of the negativity of the Moon.