October 30, 2009

Put the current Saturn ingress into perspective to gain some insights into emerging long-term trading patterns in stocks.

When I did an online webinar for Traders World recently, I identified some of the planetary dynamics that we should be keeping an eye on as possible signals of a significant turning point in the stock market.

One of them was the ingress of Saturn into Libra, which was set to take place on Thursday, October 29, 2009. Because Saturn changes zodiac sign only once every two and a half years or so, we can expect an important shift in the planetary forces when it makes that shift, and a corresponding change in stock market activity as well.

Because the full orbit of Saturn takes nearly 30 years, we only get a Saturn ingress into Libra once every three decades. While there haven't been enough of these phenomena during the modern history of the stock market to give us statistically significant data, it's nevertheless interesting to go back and take a look at how the market behaved following each such passage into Libra.

After Saturn moved into Libra on October 7, 1921, stock prices rallied sharply, carrying the Dow from a six-year low into significantly higher territory in an advance that ran into the final months of 1922.

When the phenomenon occurred again on November 20, 1950, it triggered a two-year advance in stock prices, but with lots of trading congestion along the way.

The last time Saturn entered Libra was September 21, 1980. After that event stock prices entered an 11-month period of congested trading, followed by a year of declines.

This time around the Saturn ingress into Libra precisely marked a trading top in the equities market, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbing about 200 points on the day of the ingress and then immediately turning around and dropping by 250 points the following day.

Although it's certainly possible that we will see an extended stock market rally at this point as we did in the 1920s and 1950s, a more likely scenario is that we will get some extended market topping action with a good bit of downside to follow. What's different this time, of course, is that the Saturn ingress into Libra is one of the planetary components of the Cardinal Climax that we have unfolding astrologically during the next few years, so its impact is likely to be intensified.

From a broad perspective, we can anticipate trading congestion during the topping phase to be timed by Saturn's repeated passages over the Cardinal point at the beginning of Libra, caused by Saturn's retrograde motion. It will be especially interesting to watch the market action around April 7, 2010, when Saturn will be backing up out of Libra and reentering Virgo, and on July 21, 2010, when Saturn will be going back into Libra once again.

We can expect to get a clearer picture then of the full impact of Saturn's current entry into Libra, as well as a fuller understanding of the technical trends we are experiencing.