Mercury Retrograde

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Simon.B
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Mercury Retrograde

Post by Simon.B » Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:04 pm

Hi All,

Is it my imagination or did first Mercury Retrograde of 2020 (February 17 - March 10) had much more profound effect on everyone than I can remember in recent history ?

Anyway, Earik has been talking about Mercury Retrogrades, and all of the "fun" stuff it brings for years. I did notice many occasions over the years when weird things would happen during Retrograde periods, most of the time problems would arise in the area of communication and with electronics in general. I will not go in to details how this Retrograde seemed different and a lot more intense than the ones in the past, but Market did seem to be effected by this particular one more than I ever noticed before.

Market topped 2 days before this Retrograde started on February 19, and ever since this sell off started I was thinking -wouldn't it be something if Market ends this correction exactly 2 days after Retrograde ends on March 12. Of course we don't know if correction has ended, but Market activity of the past few days suggests that at least short term some kind of a low was achieved.

Would love to hear thoughts of others on this.

Best,
Simon B.

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earik
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Re: Mercury Retrograde

Post by earik » Mon Mar 16, 2020 10:07 pm

I used to sort of ignore Mercury retrogrades, and then discovered that whenever I'd release a version of W59 during one, something would always go haywire. The people on this board started scolding me every time that happened, and I started paying attention.

I've definitely noticed that sometimes they can be mild, and other times they can be really intense. I'm not totally sure why that happens, but it may have something to do with everything else going on at the time. There was definitely a supporting cast when it went retrograde this time. Check out this chart of the most recent one:
spy_and_mercury.png
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We've had a big Saturn/Uranus square going on for awhile. Uranus is the other "computer" planet, at least according to traditional astro. Traditional astro also holds that squares are the worst of the "bad" aspects, and that bad aspects involving Saturn are always even worse. So Mercury comes along, and goes direct right at the midpoint of that square, 45 degrees from each one. Pluto is also sitting right there, and on top of that, we've got the Moon flying by and taking up a corner too. So it's like a clocks where everything comes together and strikes at the same time. Notice that Uranus is sitting right at a price of 339. And check out the top on the SPY. This was *exact*.

Earik

Simon.B
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Re: Mercury Retrograde

Post by Simon.B » Tue Mar 17, 2020 6:07 pm

Hi Earik,

Cool stuff !! Same here, I noticed over the years that Retrogrades vary a lot in their intensity. I wasn't aware of this last one until half way through.
I had a problem with virtually every piece of electronics and computers I own. At that point I decided to check on Retrograde :)

Thanks,
Simon

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ForJL
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Re: Mercury Retrograde

Post by ForJL » Tue Mar 17, 2020 10:49 pm

Hi Guys,


I meant to post this the other day but glad I never got around. Earik, I could not agree more with Simon … very cool! Actually top-notch analysis! Though I can’t say that I have any history of mechanical issues during these periods. :)


I took a different route with this and just wanted to look at price performance around these periods. I looked at a small sample set, only the last 10 occurrences, and wanted to see if there was any easily discernible behavior through simple observation. I then loosely defined significant (S) as a strong CIT out or the Retrograde period or a strong trend out of the period. If I saw neither I defined it as not significant (NS). Rather subjective to say the least.


So is there anything there? Frankly I’m just not sure. In and by itself I feel it is inconsistent. However as Earik pointed out with other things occurring at the same time the possibility exists. The one thing that I found intriguing however was that when I split the difference in time between the retro periods in half, 4 out of 9 times it produced a fairly significant CIT exactly. (Arrows)


I’ll wrap up here by saying that I believe with a larger sample size and further research something useful might be had here.


Best,
Joe
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earik
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Re: Mercury Retrograde

Post by earik » Thu Mar 19, 2020 5:01 pm

A long time ago (like roughly when W59 was born), I spent a lot of time looking at Mercury as a forecasting tool. It wasn't the retrograde/direct signals that stood out for me nearly as much as the declinations though. What I noticed is that certain stocks (like MSFT, IBM, and other computer stocks) would suddenly "snap on" to the declination curve and ride it. Check out IBM back in 2015:
ibm_2015_mercury.png
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It's not only the general shape of the curve that the market followed, but also the twists and turns when the declination curve changed directions. In this case, IBM followed it for a year or so, and then eventually decoupled, as you can see toward the right of the chart, and the two went their own way. It happens over and over like this. If you could figure out how to predict the coupling/decoupling, this would be pretty much holy grail territory.

Anyway, all that fooling with Mercury eventually led to the Declination System as discussed in the AstroTrader course. In that approach, there's a way to extract a much longer term curve out of things, which you can see below in thick red:
ibm_at_dec_system.png
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This can do a really good job as a forecasting tool (follow the curve), but I think it's even better at as a change-in-trend indicator for really long term cycles (like 2-3 times per year). Look at the Jan, 2019 low and what that red line was saying, and you'll see right away how to use it. This is a *slow* curve, so don't expect to-the-bar accuracy, because that's not what it's meant for. Red line is big picture turns, and blue line is fine tuning. All of 2019 was inverted, until we hit 2020, and got clobbered.

Earik

Simon.B
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Re: Mercury Retrograde

Post by Simon.B » Mon Mar 23, 2020 2:17 pm

Thanks Earik

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