“Astrology is the measure of time,” says San Francisco-based financial forecaster Marsilio Musing via a Zoom call with the camera off. To him, the art of interpreting planetary movements is similar to making predictions based on the movement of stock and asset performance 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,” Marsilio says. “One of my little taglines is ‘technicals and timing for the win.’”
Marsilio says he uses a pseudonym inspired by Italian Renaissance astrologist Marsilio Ficino because financial astrology is the subject of a lot of scrutiny and criticism. He bought his first crypto 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 among a group of astrologers who are consulting the stars for clues about the future behavior of crypto markets. There is no clear mechanism that would explain why planetary movements would be linked to asset prices on planet Earth, but these crypto astrologers are finding a following anyway.
“Some of the traditional [astrological] theories work quite well, but some of them don’t, or markets have their own expression of the roots energies (traditional manifestations of each sign’s archetype),” Marsilio explains. One great example, he says, is the link between Bitcoin’s performance in bull markets and “waning and waxing moons.” Traditional astrologers associate waxing moons with growth and waning moons with a winding-down energy. But in a thread on X, Marsilio analyzed the average percentage return of Bitcoin over a 15-minute time frame in all markets from April 2020 to the present and discovered the waning phase of the moon cycle correlated with a 350 percent better average performance than during the waxing phase.
Marsilio attracts private clients via posts on X, where he has a 10,000 followers, and by sharing his data on Tableau and on YouTube. For three years, he worked full time as an astrological financial adviser to a hedge fund trader until the trader’s retirement. (He refused to name the trader.) But do followers see results from his predictions? Marsilio claims that he would have no way of knowing, since most people view his content without interacting with it and don’t tend to provide him with feedback.
Grzegorz Drozdz, a market analyst at financial platform Conotoxia, believes the 350 percent figure is misleading, since the arithmetic mean “is strongly influenced by extreme values.” Although the highs of Bitcoin prices tend to occur during waning phases, this does not statistically suggest waning phases are overall periods of increased Bitcoin returns—correlation does not equal causation. “This does not mean that investing during any phase of the moon gives a statistical advantage for the future,” he says.
Another San Francisco-based financial astrologer who goes by the name Stellar Prophet claims she has a Google C-suite executive and a hedge funder among her customers (but refuses to name them for the sake of their reputations—and her own.) Most of her clients come from referrals, she explains, who then gain access to her private Instagram where she also posts financial predictions to her Instagram Close-Friends list, accessible for a fee.