The Chaldean Cycle and Market Returns
The 7 Year Planetary Cycle & The Markets
This article was inspired by the work of Portuguese financial astrologer João Medeiros, who has popularized the application of the Chaldean planetary order to calendar-year market cycles - I have expanded on this inspiration in this report.
⏱ Estimated Read Time: 10 Minutes
Ancient Babylonian and Indian Astrologers observed the 7 main celestial bodies in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
There is a phrase, the “Chaldean Order,” which is sometimes associated with modern numerology circles. Still, the word “Chaldean” actually refers to a tribe in ancient Babylon whose name became associated with astronomers and astrologers of all types in ancient times.
The “Chaldeans” proposed an order of the planets based on their apparent speeds as observed from our perspective on Earth.
In order of increasing perceived speed through the heavens from our perspective on Earth (slowest to fastest), the order is Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.
There’s also good evidence that the famous Hellenistic Astrologer Vettius Valens was aware of this ordering of the planets by apparent speed.
“And the order of the stars in relation to the days holds thus: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. But the arrangement of their orbits [around the Earth] is thus: [Saturn], Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon - Vettius Valens, Anthologies, 1.10, trans. Mark T. Riley (Sacramento: California State University, 2010), 17.
Valens is describing the planetary day sequence and the orbital speed order here, what we are calling the Chaldean order or Chaldean 7 Year Cycle, which runs Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.
Does this 7 year cycle have any predictive value in the markets?
THE CHALDEAN 7 YEAR CYCLE & THE MARKETS
For stock market data going back to 1928, we use NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran’s historical returns table. Damodaran's data retroactively uses the S&P Composite Index of 90 stocks for the pre 1957 years, and labels it under the S&P 500 lineage. So while the table says "S&P 500," the 1928 to 1956 observations are technically the S&P 90 Composite total returns.
Source: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html
So, let’s assign the 7 year cycle of planets as follows:
Saturn Years: 1936, 1943, 1950, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1978, 1985, 1992, 1999, 2006, 2013, 2020, 2027
