Tim Bost

"Are the markets really manipulated?"

That's one of the questions I get asked a lot. And all I can say in response is "Of course!"

As far as I'm concerned, that's just part of the territory. I've never found it particularly helpful to spend much time feeling like a victim, so over the years my approach has increasingly been simply to accept market manipulation as part of what's going on in the trading environment. The aim is not to imagine a pristine market that doesn't really exist, but rather to learn to trade profitably in the markets as they are.

That's why astrology is such an important market tool. It provides us with non-correlated confirmation, so as astro-traders we always have at least one perspective on the market that is beyond the reach of manipulation.

In the meantime, the mainstream media are at last getting to the point where market manipulation is being openly discussed. This is a far cry from the attitude we saw just a few short years ago.

Here's the latest discussion from CNBC, on the last day of the second quarter. It's about a six-minute video; the talk about manipulation starts about two minutes into the clip. Note that the participants aren't talking about whether or not there's manipulation going on-- they seem to be in complete agreement about that fact.