Astro Cycles and Speculative Markets | Luther James Jensen (1935 + 1978)

Luther James Jensen was born in 1900 and raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he graduated in 1922. He entered the financial sector in New York, and worked for George E. Liggett and Associates until around 1930. Jensen then moved to Kansas, where he opened the Kansas City Bureau of Economic Research in 1931 which was his business for over 25 years. For the Roosevelt-administration he authored economic forecasts (e.g. Major Trends in American Economics from 1492 to 1950: An Analysis and a Forecast), but also wrote on war and peace cycles, radio communication technology or migratory locusts (The Locust Years After 1940). During the same period one of his major private clients became W.D. Gann. Though apparently Jensen himself was never an active trader, already in 1935 he published a booklet called Astro-economic Interpretation: A Mundane Astrology Notebook; Fundamentals of Economic Forecasting which primarily relied upon transiting aspects and horoscopes of companies. Today this very dense book is considered one of the bona fide classics and finest "How-To" guidelines on financial astrology ever written. Throughout the 1940s Jensen wrote the astro-financial column Market Perspective, which was published in the American Astrology magazine.

Soon after W.D. Gann died in 1955, Jensen closed down his Kansas City Bureau of Economic Research to work for B.C. Christopher and Co. in New York from 1957 until his retirement in 1971. Then, in 1978 at the age of 77, Jensen summarized his life's work in a new, updated and expanded edition of Astro Cycles and Speculative Markets. Over 50 years of study, research, and actual application of his concepts in the stock and commodity markets have proven Jensen to be one of the great astro-economic analysts of all time. Jensen took an approach that used standard aspect qualities (trines favourable, squares negative, etc.) and standard planet qualities such as Jupiter increasing prices, Saturn depressing prices. One of the problems with much of this early work is that it gives astrological indicators but provides little verification. In 1981 L.J. Jensen passed away in Shawnee, Kansas. Hard- and e-copies of his Astro Cycles and Speculative Markets are still available today, and his methods applied by some of the most successful private traders and large companies around the globe. The following is Jensen's introduction to financial astrology: