Few market-timing ideas were as unusual as those of Jack Gillen, a Florida-based professional astrologer who began publishing yearly stock forecasts on Miami radio in 1969. His books The Key to Speculation on the New York Stock Exchange (1979) and AstroStats for the NYSE (2002) set out the methods behind those forecasts. Three of Gillen's intraday and short-term market-timing techniques are now featured as compact widgets at the bottom of this blog's right-hand column. Each displays exact dates and times calculated using the Swiss Ephemeris for New York City (geocentric and topocentric, ET). In all widgets the highlighted row always shows the current or upcoming event.
What the Sun and Moon Calendars Show
The first widget follows Gillen's Sensitive Degrees of the Sun: 48 one-degree points of the zodiac, 24 positive and 24 negative. He derived these degrees from the natal charts of the New York Stock Exchange (May 17, 1792) and the United States (July 4, 1776), then cross-checked them against the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s largest one-day gains and losses each year from 1900 to 1970. The Sun stays on one degree for about a day, so the widget lists the moment it enters each one. A positive degree marks a session with a bullish bias, and a negative degree one with a bearish bias.
The second widget tracks the Moon between Virgo and Pisces. Gillen reported that when the Moon travels from Virgo to Pisces—a period of approximately 13 to 14 days—the Dow closes higher roughly seven times out of ten, measured close to close. Each entry into Virgo initiates a "Go Long" window, while each entry into Pisces initiates the inverse "Go Short" window. Gillen implied the short-side strategy rather than documenting it separately.
The third widget displays the rapid succession of Gillen's 24 positive and 26 negative sensitive Moon degrees, which he used to time intraday trend changes in the NYSE, DJIA, and S&P 500. The rationale mirrors his Sun-degree method: certain degrees correspond to the same positions in the natal charts.
Sensitive Degrees of the Moon.
► Positive degrees include, for example, 23° Taurus (NYSE natal Mercury), 27°–28° Taurus (its Sun), 25° Cancer (its Ascendant), 15° Leo (its Uranus), and 27° Libra (its Neptune).
► Negative degrees include, for example, 16° Taurus (NYSE 11th-house cusp), 9° Aries (US Descendant and NYSE Midheaven), 4° Cancer (US Cancer cluster), 25° Capricorn (NYSE Descendant), and 9° Pisces (its 9th-house cusp).
A positive degree signals a bullish day; a negative degree can "cause a fast decline." Gillen further validates these signals through lunar aspects: Moon trine Sun is among the strongest bullish combinations, while Moon square Saturn signals a downtrend. The key difference from the Sun method is the Moon's speed: it travels approximately 13° per day, spending roughly two hours at each degree. The 50 listed degrees cover about 14% of its path, meaning most days feature at least one—and often both positive and negative—sensitive degrees.
What Testing Against Decades of S&P Data Says
Gillen’s Sensitive Degrees of the Sun and Moon-in-Virgo-Pisces trading bias are best viewed as probability tilts, not buy or sell signals. Their practical value therefore depends on how consistently those tendencies have held up historically. Tested against S&P 500 data from 1950 to date, the Sun degrees show a small positive-minus-negative gap after 1979, about 0.10% a day. That gap is borderline in significance and comes mainly from weaker negative days. It is also tiny next to ordinary daily swings of around 1.1%. Going long on positive days and short on negative ones would have earned roughly 1.7% a year before costs, inside a normal annual noise band of about 6.4%.
The Moon windows looked decent from 1950 to 2002, when 61.7% of long windows rose against 57.8% for ordinary windows of the same length, but the edge disappeared afterward. From 2003 to date only 59.0% rose against a 61% baseline, and the short windows lost money because the market tended to rise through them. Gillen’s warning that the Moon in Virgo or Pisces brings sudden shocks showed no excess of big drops, and the seasonal windows from his 2002 book failed after 2000. Gillen’s sensitive Moon degrees have not been systematically backtested against any major US stock index and should therefore be approached with experimental curiosity.
Practical Conclusion for Short-Term Traders
None of this makes Gillen's timing tools complete nonsense. A test this noisy cannot prove an effect is exactly zero, so a small real effect, such as a slight downside tilt on negative-degree days, cannot be ruled out. The strong early results also have a simple explanation: Gillen built and checked his degree lists on the same 1900–1970 history, which tends to flatter any pattern. Parts of his system were not tested at all, including his Moon-degree lists, his planetary aspects and his Saturn and Jupiter overlays. The S&P 500 also stands in for the Dow he used.
For short-term traders, the practical conclusion is that the tools are redundant as stand-alone triggers. They have not shown a repeatable edge beyond what trend, volatility and price levels provide. As a calendar of reference dates beside a trader's own analysis, they cost nothing to watch. Check market structure, range, standard deviations, and trend first, favor existing long setups when a bullish flag is active, trim positions or tighten stops when a bearish one is, and never increase size on a flag alone.
Reference:
Jack Gillen began researching speculation in 1962, at age 22. His scope covered stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, insurance, foreign securities, casino games, dog and horse racing, sports and number games. He even bought a greyhound to collect daily data. At a Kiwanis charity Las Vegas Night in Miami (December 1968), he reportedly won so many roulette prizes that the tables shut down. The research culminated in a 1970 manuscript, The Key to Speculation, privately sold for $50 a copy. His 139 selected stocks subsequently soared, attracting offers he declined, skeptical that people would accept astrology as a forecasting method. He put the material into storage. His 1975 hardcover, Jack Gillen Predicts, Vol. 1, forecast stock and commodity movements, including coffee, orange juice and gold. Impressed by his track record, business backers offered a contract worth over $1 million to apply his methods company by company across stocks, commodities, racing and sports. Instead, he chose to publish: first the NYSE volume, his first book in five years, followed by 1979 editions covering professional and college football and greyhound racing, issued by San Antonio publishers. His reference work concluded with a July 2001 Commodity Seminar and the 2002 publication Astro-Stats for the NYSE. He passed away in 2017.
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