“Astrology is the measurement of time,” says a San Francisco-based financial forecaster Marsilio reflecting via a Zoom call with the camera off. For him, the art of interpreting planetary movements is similar to making predictions based on the movement of stocks and the performance of assets over a specific period.
“I’ve been at this for a long time and I have a particular technical analysis system that I’ve been developing for many years,” says Marsilio. “One of my little slogans is ‘technique and timing to win’.”
Marsilio says he uses a pseudonym inspired by the Italian Renaissance astrologer Marsilio Ficino because financial astrology is the subject of a lot of scrutiny and criticism. He bought his first cryptocurrency ETH in 2017 based on some larger “astro patterns,” he says, but worked with Bitcoin in a previous role at a hedge fund.
He is part of a group of astrologers who consult the stars for clues about the future behavior of cryptocurrency markets. There is no clear mechanism that explains why planetary movements would be linked to asset prices on planet Earth, but these crypto astrologers are finding followers anyway.
“Some of the traditional (astrological) theories work quite well, but others do not, or the markets have their own expression of the root energies (traditional manifestations of the archetype of each sign),” explains Marsilio. A great example, he says, is the link between Bitcoin’s performance in bull markets and “waxing and waning moons.” Traditional astrologers associate waxing moons with growth and waning moons with waning energy. But in a thread in XMarsilio analyzed the average percentage return of Bitcoin over a 15-minute period across all markets from April 2020 to the present and discovered the waning phase of the lunar cycle correlated with a 350 percent better average performance than during the hair removal phase.
Marsilio attracts private clients through posts on X, where he has 10,000 followers, and by sharing his data in Tableau and in Youtube. For three years, he worked full-time as an astrological financial advisor to a hedge fund operator until his retirement. (He declined to name the trader). But do followers see the results of his predictions? Marsilio says he would have no way of knowing, since most people view his content without interacting with him and don’t tend to give him feedback.
Grzegorz Drozdz, market analyst at the financial platform Conotoxia, believes that the 350 percent figure is misleading, since the arithmetic mean “is strongly influenced by extreme values.” Although Bitcoin price highs tend to occur during declining phases, this does not statistically suggest that declining phases are general periods of higher Bitcoin returns: correlation does not equal causation. “This does not mean that investing during any phase of the moon provides a statistical advantage for the future,” he says.
Another financial astrologer based in San Francisco named star prophet he claims to have a high-level Google executive and a hedge funder among his clients (but declines to name them for the sake of his and her reputation). Most of his clients come from referrals, he explains, who then gain access to his private Instagram, where he also posts financial predictions to his Instagram close friends list, which can be accessed for a fee.