SteveS wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2024 6:11 am
Jim, can you explain how Bradley was using this technique in the market, or is too complicated?
It was part of a very complicated process. It didn't stand alone but, rather, as part of his larger "siderograph" process. As a market tool, this charting was very impressive in the one one-year sample he showed in1947, but seems to have failed thereafter. I am less interested in it for market purposes than the wider range of showing geopolitical tension, world shifts, etc. for which the underlying technique
should be viable.
The Venus-Mars declination cycles were specifically for the stock market, though. I'd have written them off long ago except, to my surprise, one night on the phone Don casually mentioned to me that there did still seem to be something about the Venus-Mars declination cycles in the market (and possibly other declination cycles). I didn't think much of it at the time (wrongly thinking that, if there was anything there, he'd eventually publish something - I didn't yet know he had very little time left). I'd forgotten about that until I was reading my new acquisition of Bradley's collected works and re-read
Stock Mariet Prediction for the first time in several decades.
The basic method he initially used is this: Every planet pair has an ongoing rise-and-fall strength. For market purposes, it is weighted positive at sextile and trine, negative at opposition and square, and either positive or negative (depending on the pair) at conjunction. (You can see this really clearly in the Jupiter-Uranus cycle - coming back to conjunction this year - in which the conjunctions, oppositions, and squares map the well-established 3.5-year (42-month) market cycle.) You have to
calculate the sine value of the separation of each individual planet pair every single day (which is a monstrous amount of work). The specific technique is to do this for all planet pairs from Jupiter-Saturn outward to get the long-term trends; except you add to those 10 outer planet pairs the Venus-Mars declination cycle (half of their combined declinations, essentially the midpoint of their declinations). This gives you the long-term trend. To combine middle-terms, you then first multiply the long-terms by a weighting factor determined experimentally (let's say for the moment you multiply it by four) and then calculate the daily values for the other 26 non-luminary aspect pairs (every day!). [Adding Moon aspects would provide the short-term or daily variations.]
The amount of work is beyond me. For more general "where do tensions vs. ease, pessimism vs. optimism rise and fall in the world," you would leave out the Venus-Mars declinations (used only for economic purposes) and not weight the long-terms. Just add everything together. I'd love to experiment with this but can't stop everything to do the math.
There is an offered piece of software to do all of this. I don't know if it gives the flexibility to divorce the distinctive economic factors from the others. Also a book with every year's curve drawn out for a century or so. I can't justify spending the $75-$100 for it so I've been skipping it but thought I would at least experiment with the Venus-Mars trends on their own.
It just so happens that the Susan the author of my new book on Radical Charts for markets stated to always watch for the market you are trading when Venus (she says this is the money planet for NYSE) goes out of bounds. Can you or will SF explain to me how to take SF and determine when Venus goes out of bounds? Thanks.
That's easier to track. Venus declination above 23N26 or below 23S26. Those are the extremes in the curve I marked above. You can just do a graphic ephemeris in SF using declination instead of longitude and showing Venus only (that's what I did above with Venus and Mars declinations).
Pick graphic ephemeris. Set location (say, NYC: it only affects time zone) and add the start date and period you want (I did three years above). In the middle pain, select transits. Change "longitude" to "declination." Set it at 45° or 30° so you don't have wasted space. Uncheck all boxers except "Deg GridLines" and "Date Gridlines." On the right, under Transits, pick only Venus. Run it.
You can read off the graph when it crosses 23° either north or south. (Hovering over the line gives you more detailed information.)
BTW, any Solar Fire list of declinations, including the Report button on a given chart, shows declinations of "out of bounds" planets (so-called) in red instead of black.
Running the above for three years beginning in 2023, you can see Venus above 23° N in most of the second quarter of 2023 and just briefly in late second quarter this year. It drops below 23° S in most of the fourth quarter of this year.
Possibly, though, this should be combined with the Mars scores and not taken alone; but the Venus out-of-bounds periods would be times that would drive the combined curve high and low anyway.
Consideration of these declination cycle raises the question of whether the planets' dec cycles are part of the picture. I mention this because Jupiter's declination is currently climbing and combines with the Mars curve over the next 12 months. Is this a measurement of greater productivity? Or no such thing. A surge of many declination cycles converge in peaks late Q2 this year: Is this irrelevant, or does the fast-cycle Mercury declination tip it? Or is this merely a typical behavior around the summer solstice? (It's a tighter peak this year than last year or next year.) Here is a picture of how all of these converge late Q2.
Q2.png
Jupiter peaked declination in the years
right after the 1929 crash. It surely did not match the stock market alone in terms of rise and falls - quite the opposite - but does (on that occasion) mark the time when vast amounts of federal money were poured into the economy. Jupiter's peak catches the surging up during the Kennedy-Johnson years but is wrong in 1978-79 which were down-market years.
By itself it seems (from a casual glance) wrong half the time and right half the time. Some of the times it's wrong, the Saturn cycle was a factor with tops or bottoms. There may be nothing to all of this, but there does seem to be enough smoke to poke around looking for a fire.
Taking Saturn lows - extreme southern declination - as marking down-market is interesting and not too bad of a match. It makes me wonder if the Saturn declination cycle peas are related to resistance to inflation. Look what happened in the '70s, for example. It bottom exactly around the '29 crash.
Jim, thanks for the SF data. I have opened a dialouge with Susan who is a very experienced financial astrologer, and I know she has a litte experience with Bradley's work. I will try to investigate her experience/market experiece. Thanks again.