Marsilio Musing, a financial forecaster based in San Francisco, is dedicated to interpreting the stars to invest in the cryptocurrency market. The people at Wired have spoken with him and what they have found is a true example that pseudosciences can be part of the most ruthless capitalism.
According to The Wired, for him, the art of interpreting planetary movements is similar to making predictions based on the movement of stocks and the performance of assets during a specific period.
“I have been in this for a long time, and I have a particular technical analysis system that I have been developing for many years,” says Marsilio.
A pseudonym to avoid being persecuted in real life
Marsilio says he uses a pseudonym inspired by the Italian Renaissance astrologer Marsilio Ficino because financial astrology is subject to much scrutiny and criticism. He bought his first ETH crypto in 2017 based on some larger “astro patterns,” he says, but worked with Bitcoin in a previous role at a hedge fund.
He is among a group of astrologers who consult the stars in search of clues about the future behavior of crypto markets. There is no clear mechanism that explains why planetary movements are linked to asset prices on planet Earth, but these cryptologists are finding followers anyway.
“Some of the traditional [astrological] theories work quite well, but others don’t, 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 bullish markets and “waning and waxing moons.” Traditional astrologers associate waxing moons with growth and waning moons with decreasing energy.
But in a Twitter thread, Marsilio analyzed the average percentage performance of Bitcoin in a 15-minute timeframe in all markets from April 2020 to the present and discovered that the waning phase of the lunar cycle correlated with an average performance 350% better than during the waxing phase.
Marsilio attracts private clients through Twitter posts, where he has 10,000 followers, and by sharing his data on Tableau and YouTube. For three years, he worked full-time as an astrological financial advisor for a hedge fund investor until his retirement.
Grzegorz Drozdz, market analyst at the Conotoxia financial platform, believes that the 350% figure is misleading, as the arithmetic mean “is heavily influenced by extreme values”. Although Bitcoin price highs tend to occur during shrinking phases, this does not statistically suggest that shrinking phases are generally periods of higher Bitcoin profitability: correlation does not imply causation.
Another financial astrologer from San Francisco, who goes by the name Stellar Prophet, claims to have a Google executive and a high-risk investor among her clients. She explains that most of her clients come from referrals, who then gain access to her private Instagram, where she also posts financial predictions to her close friends list on Instagram, which can be accessed for a fee.
Meanwhile, the financial astrologer from Seattle known as Crypto Damus, real name Robert Weinstein, publishes his general predictions to an audience of 38,300 subscribers on Twitter, conducts private consultations, and sends a weekly newsletter to almost 400 subscribers on Patreon. Each edition of his newsletter begins with a “due diligence” disclaimer to clarify that he is not a financial advisor and that his work is based on “probability”.
Your clients don’t understand astrology… but they listen to you
Despite the strong emphasis on astrology in all of these accounts, a good number of respondents on social media do not seem to understand the astrological terminology, according to astrologers, but they still follow them and ask for their insights.
“At the end of the day, the issue is not just the accuracy rate, but whether it communicates in a way that is useful for anyone interacting with me. If I make a good prediction and only one out of ten people understand it, then it’s not really valuable,” says Marsilio.
Financial astrologers agree on the importance of certain transits, for example, Marsilo only relies on data collected from transits, while Crypto Damus also invokes the natal chart of Bitcoin, a snapshot of the sky at the time of the genesis block with a timestamp.
“The stellium of Pluto, Mars, and the Sun at the beginning of Capricorn are the most reliable points in the natal chart,” he says. A “stellium” is considered to be three planets within a specific sign at the same time. In the case of Bitcoin, whenever its Capricorn stellium is in a positive transit, Bitcoin tends to see positive movements.
Stellar Prophet uses a similar methodology, but claims that it needs at least four points of positive indicators, for example, a Venus transit interacting with the Bitcoin Sun or a Jupiter and Neptune conjunction in Aquarius, to make an upward movement call.
And although Stellar Prophet does not keep quantitative data on the accuracy of its predictions, it estimates that the majority have been fulfilled as predicted and includes timestamped screenshots in its Instagram Story Highlights. But still, forecasts are not infallible.
The topic is interesting, as interesting as the scam it is. Everything surrounding astrology is nothing more than baseless conjecture, so never invest based on the position of the moon, just like you don’t invest based on whether the day is clear or cloudy.
