The Washington Post recently interviewed Maren Altman, “a really serious person,” who has amassed more than 1-million followers on TikTok by applying astrology to a particularly daunting realm: cryptocurrency.
As the paper explains: “Anything with a verifiable birthday or creation date has a birth chart that can be read and, according to astrologers, gleaned for predictive information. That means there’s astrology for relationships, pets, political movements and, yes, bitcoin.”
Cynics might see it as a perfect match: two things that feel like foreign languages to most people. “Social media is this amplifier for everything in general. And astrology is just one of the things I think is really benefiting from it,” says financial astrologer Robert Weinstein.
In early January, Maren read bitcoin’s chart, using its creation date of January 3 2009. “New moon in Capricorn, January 13th, looks big for bitcoin,” Maren says in the video. “Little before that ... Saturn will join the bitcoin Mercury exact by degree on January 11th, which looks like some corrections with Mercury and Saturn.
“It could be news about something that leads to a drop momentarily. But with this new moon, sun moon Pluto, right on top of bitcoin’s Jupiter, this is like atomic-level new beginning.” In other words, Saturn and Mercury’s position might indicate a drop in value, but Jupiter and Pluto signalled bitcoin’s price would rebound from any correction and continue to rise. “It looks like such a bull run,” concluded Altman.
Muriel Hasbrouck began her research on earthquake but changed tracks when her husband noticed that many of the dates that she generated coincided with stock market moves. She established Space-Time Forecasting and developed a following on Wall Street. The US government initially showed an interest in her work, offering to assist in further research until it suddenly shut her down one day. The reason was never made clear, but it would appear that the dates that she projected corresponded to the dates of secret missile tests.
“It’s hard to argue that everything going on in financial markets lately is particularly smart,” say Vox.com. “The question is, how silly should we let things get? Meme stocks like GameStop are still swinging wildly as they go in and out of fashion on Reddit. AMC recently told people buying its stock that they’re probably going to lose all their money. People are piling into cryptocurrencies based on memes and learning some hard lessons in volatility, much of which is driven by Elon Musk’s tweets. The NFT bubble might have already popped because it turns out spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a GIF might not be the soundest investment.”
Many investors are trading like it’s a game, one they are likely to lose — some knowingly, some not. Should there be some way to stop people from buying things at stupid prices?
The thing is, as Andrew Park, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, points out, “there’s a key difference between people doing stupid things with their money versus being exploited or manipulated. There’s a fine line between keeping people from taking unreasonable risks and locking them out of opportunities, between letting people do what they want with their money and keeping them from being swindled.”
Unreasonable risk-taking is hardly new; the same goes for loopy approaches to the market. Some of the more bizarre stories, regarding Jesse Livermore’s attempts to rehabilitate himself after he was forced to declare bankruptcy for the second time in 1934, is that from his friend Bernie Chapman, who had adopted a stray black cat. The cat was quite promiscuous, frequently becoming pregnant. Each time the animal gave birth Livermore would reverse his position in the market. “Invariably,” Chapman claims, “he made money every time I wired him that the cat had kittens. And when I one day wired him that the cat was dead, he fainted!”
Technology supposedly changes everything. If that’s true, it excludes the odds of success. In fact, new technology and constant product innovation may be making it so difficult for the average investor and trader to keep up that their odds of success may well be falling.
You can package and dress the stock market as much as you like in CFDs, options, warrants, guarantees, managed funds, black boxes and quick fixes with the help of technical analysts, fund managers and economists, but none of that changes what it really takes to succeed — which is to correctly predict which way stocks prices will move.
When all is said and done, that’s all that matters. Unfortunately, it’s never been easy. And certainly not as easy as getting everyone to believe that it’s easy. How much to protect investors becomes an even thornier question when they need to be protected from themselves. Day traders often want to be able to take more risks, not fewer.
Besides, betting on a newly minted meme stock such as Wendy’s or cryptocurrency like dogecoin isn’t all that different from playing blackjack or feeding slot machines in a casino. And Wall Street bigwigs take risks all the time, risks that can have major consequences for everyone.