(1 February 2026) Stocks were mostly lower last week amid market turbulence following the sudden crash of gold and silver prices. While the blue chip S&P 500 managed to finish the week slightly higher, all the other major indexes lost ground including the small cap Russell 2000 which fell 2%.
The decline broadly aligned with our model which suggested an elevated downside risk in and around the Mars-Pluto conjunction on Jan 27. While our backtest showed only a modest average decline of -0.5% from this pairing, it nonetheless came very close to reaching statistical significance across several time intervals. The updated cumulative trend chart below indicates an average and median underperformance for at least 6 days after the conjunction. This equates to Monday, Feb 2 for the current conjunction. Further downside is possible, of course, although the data suggest it becomes less likely as time goes on. In the updated chart, we can see that the price effects of the current conjunction (the red line) may also be simply reverting to the mean following a period of outperformance…
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