“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.
“It's definitely word of mouth,” she says. “But I remember looking at my own astrology, making plans for my [financial] moves, and seeing that I will always have the ability to be in rooms with very influential and wealthy people regarding finance and technology. And so, as I continue to theorize on that and test it, it has proven to be true.”
Meanwhile, the Seattle-based financial astrologer known as Crypto Damus, real name Robert Weinstein, posts his general predictions to an audience of 38.3K subscribers on X, holds private consultations and sends out a weekly newsletter to nearly 400 subscribers on Patreon. Each edition of his newsletter begins with a “due diligence” disclaimer to clarify that he is not a financial adviser and that his work is based on “probability.”
Despite the heavy emphasis on astrology for all of these accounts, a good number of social media respondents don’t seem to understand the astrological terminology, according to the astrologers, but are still following and asking for the insights.
“At the end of the day, the question is not just accuracy rate, but is it communicated in a way that's helpful to anyone who's interacting with me? If I make a good call and only one out of 10 people understand it, then it's not really valuable,” Marsilio says.
Financial astrologers agree on the importance of certain transits, or when the planets move from one astrological sign to another and make particular angles to other planets. Mars in Aries historically causes Bitcoin to perform well, according to Marsilo’s data and Crypto Damus’ observations, and all three astrologers have data that they claim shows that Saturn transits, especially conjunctions, in the Bitcoin natal chart have an 80 percent hit rate of a Bitcoin pullback. But each forecaster has their own method of triaging which planets will most impact Bitcoin’s movement.
For example, Marsilo relies only on data collected from transits while Crypto Damus also invokes Bitcoin’s birth chart, a snapshot of the sky at the moment of the time-stamped genesis block.
“The stellium of Pluto, Mars, and the sun in early Capricorn—those are the most reliable points in the natal chart,” he says. A “stellium” is considered three planets within any given sign at the same time. In Bitcoin’s case, whenever its Capricorn stellium is in a positive transit, Bitcoin tends to see positive movements.
Stellar Prophet uses a similar methodology but claims to need at least four points of positive indicators, e.g., a Venus transit interacting with Bitcoin’s Sun or a Jupiter and Neptune conjunction in Aquarius, to make an upward movement call. And although Stellar Prophet doesn’t keep quantitative data about the accuracy of her calls, she estimates the majority have played out as predicted and includes time-stamped screenshots in her Instagram Story Highlights. But still, forecasts are not ironclad.
“Even if my own personal trades are doing well, if [a client] is having a Saturn transit, [it] has just entered their house where their Venus is and how loud of an energy that is—for that individual, they are not OK,” she says. “The feedback is not good, but there's an understanding that’s how you grow as a financial astrologer.”
Although none of the astrologers keep a running tally of their calls, Crypto Damus’ feedback leans toward the quantitative. He notes he’ll receive backlash on X or unsubscribes from his Patreon when his following is displeased with his calls.
“In trading, the only question is whether you’re profitable or not—one big win can knock out 10 small losses. It’s more about your overall trend analysis,” he says. “But if you go back on my Twitter [to September, October, November, and December of 2023] , I have some really legendary calls there.” For example, on September 20, 2023, he called the timeframe for Bitcoin’s return to over $30,000.
As for the future of Bitcoin, both Marsilio and Crypto Damus are bullish—at least for the next month or so. “The really most important thing, as I've said, is where we are going to end up in late May and early June. There's a lot of very favorable astrology there,” forecasts Crypto Damus. That favorable astrology includes a Jupiter conjunction with Venus and Uranus. Historically, Jupiter transits coincide with Bitcoin cycle tops. “Astrology isn’t always about predicting the future,” he says. "It’s looking at what’s happening in the present, based on the past.”
