100 Years of Moons and Markets

Every financial astrologer who has ever posted a lunar market call has, at some point, been asked the same fair question: does this actually hold up, or are you just noticing the hits and forgetting the misses. Usually the honest answer is that nobody checked. I checked.

Already a subscriber to Market Watching the Moon? You already own this.
 
This report is included in full for every paid subscriber to Market Watching the Moon on Substack, no separate purchase required. If you would rather not subscribe, the complete monograph is also available below as a one-time digital download.

This monograph runs every quarter lunation, New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, and Last Quarter, from August 1926 through August 2026 against the Dow Jones Industrial Average's daily closing price on the corresponding trading day. That is 4,945 separate observations, spanning the Depression, two world wars, stagflation, the dot-com crash, 2008, and everything since, matched through a fixed, repeatable protocol rather than a handful of favorite examples chosen because they happened to work out. Every element, phase, modality, and sign in the twelve-sign zodiac is measured the same way, against the same century-long baseline, so no group gets an easier test than any other.

Resolved sign by sign, the twelve-sign table is not flat. Two signs pull away from the other ten, and they do not do it once. Each one holds its position across all four lunar phases independently, four separate checks agreeing with each other rather than one lucky average built from a handful of good or bad months. Both signs also line up with a rhythm the market already runs on every year, a seasonal mood shift most traders feel without ever putting a name to it, timed here against the lunar cycle with more precision than "sometime in the fall." Which two signs, how far apart they sit, and exactly where that seasonal alignment lands are in the report.

Cross all twelve signs against all four phases and the spread widens considerably, well past what sign alone shows, into the finest resolution this framework applies anywhere. Rather than stopping at the headline number, the monograph walks through what forty-eight simultaneous comparisons demand statistically: how many significant cells chance alone predicts, what a Bonferroni correction does to that count, and which conclusions survive that correction and which do not. The single highest and single lowest cells in the entire study, and the calendar events they line up with, are named and examined in full.

This is not a horoscope, and it does not read like one. Every finding is reported alongside its p-value, explained in plain language at its first appearance for readers without a statistics background. The monograph states its evidentiary limits without softening them, including the structural reason modality-level results carry a different status than sign-level ones, and closes with four pre-specified, falsifiable tests, including a daily-resolution study of earnings-season and tax-season timing already underway, designed to hold the central finding accountable against data this book has not yet seen.

Whether you subscribe to Market Watching the Moon and get this report as part of your subscription, or purchase this monograph on its own, you are getting the complete study, not a teaser: full methodology, every honest limitation, and the receipts behind every claim, with the actual findings inside where they belong.