The holdings in this portfolio are not a fixed legacy selection but the product of a dynamic, ongoing investment process. Each name reflects current screening criteria centered on secular momentum, macro alignment, and risk-adjusted return potential. The strategy employs equal weighting and disciplined annual rebalancing, which systematically reduces exposure to extended positions and redeploys capital to names with higher relative opportunity. As underperformers are removed and high-conviction names confirmed through performance reviews, the portfolio evolves into a concentrated set of equities designed to compound persistently — not just relative to the S&P 500, but in absolute terms across full market cycles.

🧭 Portfolio Overview

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Three weeks of gains. Back-to-back-to-back, and by last week’s close the S&P 500 and NASDAQ had pushed to record territory. So when the market paused this week — S&P 500 fractionally higher, Dow slightly lower, NASDAQ carrying the week on semiconductor strength — it read like a breath. A natural rest after exertion.

That’s one way to read it.

The other way: look at oil. And then look at the chart.

What the Sky Is Doing

The chart for April 24 opens with two immediately striking features.

The first is an almost exact Sun-Pluto square. Sun at 4° Taurus, Pluto at 5° Aquarius, 0°49’ of separation. That is effectively exact. In the Placidus chart for noon this day, the Sun is conjunct the Midheaven — it is the most public, visible, prominent point in the chart. Pluto sits in the 6th house: the house of daily conditions, systemic stress, and the invisible machinery of health and work. A near-exact square between the most visible point in the chart and the planet of hidden power, compulsion, and forced reckoning is not a background configuration. It is the signature of the week.

Sun-Pluto squares describe weeks where the surface story and the underlying story are genuinely different. Not contradictory — different in depth. The indices said: mixed, orderly, breathing room. Pluto in the 6th said: the systemic pressures are accumulating in places that don’t show up in the closing print.

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A portfolio is not a stone monument. It is a garden. And gardens need tending.

My son asked me recently why stocks move in and out of the Lunar Landing Portfolio, often week to week. There was a worry in his voice, the quiet fear that change meant instability. I remember feeling that same anxiety once—the belief that if a stock left the list, it must have failed, or worse, I must have. But the truth is gentler than that.

Turnover isn’t about failure.
Turnover is about alignment.

Markets shift. Companies evolve. Performance waxes and wanes. And the criteria I use—the five-year returns, the rolling-year windows, the drawdowns—are always recalculating, always catching new patterns, always adjusting to the movement of the world. When a stock leaves the list, it usually means another has risen to meet the criteria more strongly. That’s all. It’s not a condemnation; it’s a recalibration.

I told my son that turnover becomes a problem only when we treat it as something urgent or absolute. But if we approach it with patience, turnover becomes nothing more than a quiet invitation to reconsider our holdings.

Should we adjust immediately?
Not always.
Sometimes not at all.

A stock exiting the list is simply information. It tells us the metrics have shifted—but it doesn’t tell us how quickly we must act. Some investors choose to mirror the list exactly, shifting every time the criteria shift. Others move slowly, easing into the new selections over weeks or months. Both approaches are valid, as long as they are intentional.

The mistake is reacting from fear.

Fear rushes us.
Fear pushes us to sell before we understand.
Fear convinces us that the list is a mandate rather than a guide.

But turnover, when viewed from a place of steadiness, becomes an opportunity. It asks, “Does this stock still serve your portfolio’s goals? Does its story still align with who you are as an investor?” Sometimes the answer is yes, even if the metrics have softened. Other times the answer is no, and the turnover simply illuminates the truth we already sensed but hadn’t acknowledged.

What I’ve learned is that portfolios evolve in the same way people do—gradually, unevenly, through moments of clarity followed by stretches of uncertainty. And just as we don’t transform overnight, neither should our portfolios.

Turnover is a reminder that investing is a long conversation, not a series of urgent commands.

I explained to my son that adjusting a portfolio should feel like a slow exhale, not a gasp. You can transition out of a stock over time, letting the position unwind naturally. Or you can wait for a clearer signal before moving at all. What matters is not the speed of the adjustment, but the clarity behind it.

Sometimes turnover reveals new opportunities—companies that bring stability, lower volatility, or stronger long-term performance. Other times it simply helps us recognize when a once-strong company is drifting from the path we want to follow.

But in all cases, turnover invites reflection.
What do I value?
What am I trying to build?
What pace of change feels honest to me?

When I finished talking, I saw something shift in my son. The tension softened. Turnover no longer looked like a threat, but a natural part of tending to something alive.

In the end, adjusting a portfolio isn’t about chasing the perfect lineup.
It’s about honoring the evolution of your strategy, your understanding, and your own inner steadiness.

Turnover is not a disruption.
It is a gentle reminder that everything—markets, companies, investors—changes with time.
And when we learn to move with that change rather than fear it, our portfolios become reflections not of reaction, but of wisdom.

I set out to understand why I kept making the same mistake.

Not the same trade — the same internal move that came before every bad one. The panic sell. The FOMO entry. The moment I watched myself override my own analysis because the feeling in my chest was louder than anything on the screen. I had the technical tools. I had years in markets. I had serious astrological training. And still, the emotional pressure would show up and rearrange everything.

That question is what eventually became this guide.

What the Guide Is

A Practitioner’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence, Lunar Cycles, and Long-Term Financial Resilience is the most complete thing I’ve written about how I actually use astrology in my own financial life.

Not as a prediction tool. Not as a timing system for entries and exits. As a mirror for internal state — which turns out to be the variable that matters most.

The thesis is this: what separates long-term financial success from failure is not better analysis, not access to superior data, not even timing. It is emotional management. How well you regulate yourself when uncertainty is high and real money is at risk. Behavioral finance has catalogued the failure modes for decades — loss aversion, recency bias, FOMO entries made well after the primary move. These are not character flaws. They are what a nervous system does under perceived threat. The prefrontal cortex hands off to the threat-response system, and the decisions that come out are faster, more reactive, and more likely to damage the portfolio they were supposed to protect.

Astrology, used as a mirror rather than a forecast, can address this in a concrete way.

What’s Inside

The guide opens with the core thesis and works through the practical framework I’ve built over time. The lunar cycle as a personal decision map. The Moon’s sign and phase as a way to calibrate emotional readiness before you put capital at risk. Mercury retrograde as a recurring window for financial audit and review — not an excuse for inaction, but a structured invitation to do the unglamorous work. The 2nd and 8th house axis as the architecture of how you relate to money, what’s yours, what’s shared, and where the decisions actually live.

It covers the traps that most investors don’t name: how Jupiter transits generate overconfidence, what Saturn transits reward when you let them do their slow work. There’s a full section on set and setting — how to structure the environment before any session of financial work, and how to close it cleanly so you’re not half-monitoring the market from every room for the rest of the day.

The long game section covers dollar-cost averaging, the Habitual Outperformer Method, and the structural choices that make it possible to hold through volatile markets without blowing your risk parameters. There’s also a chapter I wasn’t sure I’d include — on what I call the money unreality, the altered-state quality that markets produce when significant capital is on the line, and how to stay grounded inside it.

The guide closes with twelve concrete practices. A field guide you can start using now, without prior astrological knowledge.

Who This Is For

This is for the investor or trader who is already technically competent and knows — somewhere underneath the analysis — that the missing piece isn’t more data. It’s for the person who has read the finance books and the astrology books and sensed there was a conversation between them that nobody had quite written yet.

More than anything, it’s for anyone who has watched themselves override their own better judgment under pressure. Who knows what that moment feels like, and wants a framework for catching it earlier next time.

You don’t need to know astrology. You need to be honest about what actually drives your decisions.

A Note on What This Guide Is Not

It does not predict market movements. It does not tell you which stocks to buy or when. It is not financial advice.

It’s the inner work — the self-knowledge layer that most financial systems skip because it’s harder to package and slower to reward. In my experience, it turned out to matter more than anything else.

How to Access It

The full PDF is available to paid subscribers of Market Watching the Moon. If you’re already subscribed — thank you. The download link is waiting below.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, this guide is a good reason to start. The newsletter is the ongoing conversation this work opens into: lunar cycle guides, the Habitual Outperformer basket, financial astrology analysis, and the occasional longer piece when something is worth the space.

Ryan Hunt is an advanced professional astrologer, enterprise architect, and long-term investor based in Berkeley, California. He has been active in financial markets since his early teens and practicing astrology for decades. Market Watching the Moon is his ongoing integration of those two disciplines.

© Ryan Hunt. All rights reserved. For educational purposes only. Not financial advice.

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That is completely understandable. It is also worth revisiting.

Not because your current setup is necessarily wrong. But because “secure” — that word every provider plasters across their homepage — actually means two different things, and most of us have only ever thought about one of them.

I spent some time this week going deep on a question that came up in our community: is Proton actually more private and secure than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365 for a business? The conversation kept producing good follow-up questions. What happens when you email someone on Gmail? What ever happened to PGP? Can you still use Outlook if you want real encryption? One thread pulled another until there was enough material to justify sitting down and writing it all out properly.

The result is a whitepaper I am calling Privacy vs. Security: A Plain-English Guide to Proton, Google Workspace, and What Actually Protects Your Business. You can download it at the link below. The short version of what it covers is this.

Privacy and security are not the same word.

Security is the steel door. It keeps the burglar out. Google and Microsoft are genuinely exceptional at this. They spend billions of dollars a year on cybersecurity infrastructure, employ some of the most skilled engineers in the field, and have unparalleled visibility into global threat patterns because they process so much of the world’s email. If your primary fear is a criminal trying to break into your systems, both platforms are extraordinary choices.

Privacy is something else entirely. Privacy is the blackout curtains. It is not about keeping the burglar out. It is about whether the landlord can see inside. Google and Microsoft hold the encryption keys to your data. This means they can read it if they choose to, or are legally required to. They are US companies subject to laws that allow quiet government data requests. Most businesses on paid plans will never feel this in any practical way. But the architecture makes it possible.

Proton’s architecture makes it impossible. When you save a file to Proton Drive or receive an email in ProtonMail, it is encrypted on your device before it ever reaches their servers. Proton does not hold a key. Not a spare, not a backup. If a government compels them to hand over your data, they hand over locked boxes. The math does not bend for court orders.

The Gmail problem is real, and it trips people up.

One of the questions that came up in the original conversation was exactly the right one: if I use Proton for its encryption but I email people who use Gmail, does that break the protection? Yes, for those specific messages. End-to-end encryption only works when both sides have matching keys. When your Proton email lands on Google’s servers, Google receives it in a readable format. The privacy shield was intact on your end. It ends where Gmail begins.

This does not make Proton useless for mixed communication. Everything stored on Proton stays encrypted. Your Proton-to-Proton messages are completely sealed. And Proton built a password-protected email feature specifically for sending sensitive information to people who do not use Proton. The whitepaper covers all of this in detail, including exactly how the feature works.

Proton is essentially PGP with the annoying parts removed.

PGP — Pretty Good Privacy — was invented in 1991. The mathematics behind it have never been broken. In the early days of email, it was the gold standard for secure communication, used by security researchers, journalists, activists, and anyone else who genuinely needed privacy. It never went mainstream because using it was genuinely painful. You had to manually generate keys, share them with every contact, and decrypt messages through a separate piece of software. Convenience won. People chose Gmail.

Proton was built by scientists who met at CERN in Switzerland. They looked at PGP and recognized that the cryptography was perfect and the user experience was broken. So they automated everything that made it painful. Your keys are generated when you create an account. Decryption happens invisibly when you open a message. You never see the math. The result is a system that has the same mathematical foundations as 1990s PGP with none of the 1990s friction.

The whitepaper also covers how to use traditional PGP today if you want to, including options for Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and Outlook, plus the Proton Mail Bridge for people who want Proton-grade encryption without changing their email client.

The question that actually matters: what are you protecting against?

Security professionals call this a threat model. It sounds technical. It is not. It just means: what, specifically, are you afraid of?

If your primary concern is cybercriminals, phishing attacks, ransomware, and accidental data exposure, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are genuinely excellent answers. They have the detection infrastructure, the integrations, and the collaboration tools that make daily work faster and more resilient. On a paid plan with two-factor authentication enforced, they represent a high standard of protection against the threats most businesses actually face.

If your primary concern is confidentiality from institutions — governments, regulatory bodies, litigation, competitive intelligence — then the mathematical certainty of zero-access encryption is worth the trade-offs in functionality. Law firms, healthcare providers, investigative journalists, anyone handling intellectual property in high-stakes markets. For these cases, Proton’s architecture is not a preference. It is a structural requirement.

Many businesses are somewhere in the middle, which is why the whitepaper ends with a note that these platforms do not have to be mutually exclusive. Some businesses run both: Proton for sensitive communications, Google or Microsoft for daily operational work. The point is to make the decision consciously rather than by default.

The whitepaper is formatted for easy reading and does not assume any technical background. Tables compare the platforms directly across the features that matter most. Every analogy is written for someone who has never had to think about encryption before and, ideally, will not need to again once they understand the basics.

Download it below. Share it with anyone in your life who has ever asked you whether they should switch to Proton, or wondered whether Google is actually reading their emails, or just quietly assumed that “secure” on a marketing page means the same thing every time.

It does not. Now you know why.

https://www.ryan-hunt.com/resources/authorial-transparency-statement

[Download the whitepaper: Privacy vs. Security — A Plain-English Guide]

When my son asked me how much he should place in each part of his portfolio, I felt that familiar tug—an urge to give him a clear, definitive answer. But allocation doesn’t work that way. It can be guided, shaped, encouraged, but it cannot be dictated. It must be discovered.

Still, I told him the starting point is simple:
Grow where you can, ground where you must.

In our twenties, most of us place our money in the winds—growth stocks, ambitious companies, ideas reaching toward the future with trembling fingers. And that makes sense. Time is abundant then. Risk feels less like danger and more like possibility. Losses can be recovered, and even mistakes carry their own gifts.

But as the years accumulate, as families form and responsibilities deepen, something shifts. The storms we once ignored begin to matter. We begin craving a different kind of certainty, one rooted not in potential but in resilience. And so the portfolio evolves with us.

For me, allocation has settled into a kind of rhythm:

A core of growth—fifteen to twenty stocks—
balanced by dividends, ETFs, and the quiet pause of cash.

Growth satisfies the part of me that still believes in what the world can become. These stocks rise and stumble and rise again, mirroring the restless movement of our own ambitions. But they do not carry the whole burden anymore.

Dividend stocks arrived later in my life, when I realized I needed an anchor—something that paid me simply for being patient, for staying invested, for trusting the slow compounding of time. They steadied me. They softened the edges of the volatile days.

ETFs formed the bridge between these worlds. Broad, calm, inclusive. They gather many companies into a single vessel, reducing the volatility that individual stocks sometimes bring. For years I underestimated their power, but I see now how they hold the portfolio together with a kind of quiet strength.

And then there is cash—uncelebrated, often ignored, but deeply important. Cash is breathing room. Optionality. Safety. It is the space you keep open for the moment when opportunity arrives quietly, without warning. I used to think holding cash was a sign of hesitation. Now I see it as a sign of readiness.

When I explained all this to my son, I watched him try to assemble the pieces into something definitive. “So how much,” he asked, “should I put where?”

And I told him the truth:
Allocation is personal.
It is shaped by fear, by confidence, by age, by intuition, by the weight of our commitments and the dreams we haven’t spoken aloud. But there are principles he can lean on while he finds his rhythm:

• Let growth carry a meaningful portion—enough to matter, not enough to overwhelm.

• Let dividends and ETFs soften the volatility of your hopes.

• Let cash remind you that waiting is a strategy, not a failure.

• And let your temperament guide you more than any rule ever could.

At fifty-one, my allocation reflects a lifetime of learning. At twenty-two, his will reflect the beginning of that journey. And that is how it should be. Allocation is not a formula—it is a reflection of the life we are living right now.

In the end, the question is not “How much should I put where?”
The question is “What balance allows me to grow without losing my peace?”

And once we answer that, the portfolio begins to take shape almost on its own—
quietly, honestly, in harmony with the person we are becoming.

My son asked me recently how to manage risk, and I found myself pausing before answering—not because I didn’t know what to say, but because risk has never been just a technical concept to me. It’s personal. It lives in the pit of your stomach when a stock plummets for reasons you can’t fully understand. It lives in the long nights spent wondering if you acted too quickly or too slowly. It lives in the quiet hope that tomorrow will undo what today delivered.

I told him that the first truth of risk management is this:
Risk cannot be removed. It can only be recognized.

And once we recognize it, we can begin to shape our portfolios in ways that honor our own limits—our patience, our needs, our stage of life.

For me, risk management begins with structure. A portfolio isn’t just a collection of stocks; it’s an expression of temperament. The Lunar Landing Portfolio favors consistency and low drawdowns because my heart no longer wants the storms I once tolerated. Younger investors, like my son, can endure more of those storms. But even then, risk should never be left to chance.

Diversification helps, of course, but only when it’s deliberate. There’s a difference between scattering investments and building a balanced architecture. Growth stocks offer possibility, but dividend stocks offer grounding. ETFs create stability, while cash creates breath—a place to rest, a place to wait, a place to act when opportunity appears. Risk management is learning how much of each the soul can carry.

But structure alone isn’t enough. There is also awareness—the quiet practice of listening to yourself.
How do you respond when the market dips 10%?
When your favorite company drops unexpectedly?
When headlines swirl with fear?

Our emotional reactions reveal more about our risk tolerance than any spreadsheet ever could.

I told my son that risk management is as much about self-knowledge as it is about numbers. The person who panics at every downturn should not chase volatile stocks, no matter how promising they look on paper. And the person who sleeps soundly through turbulence might carry more growth than someone else can bear. Risk is never one-size-fits-all. It’s personal, intimate, shaped by history and hope.

Then there is the simple wisdom of position sizing—never allowing one stock to hold so much weight that its fall becomes catastrophic. Even strong companies stumble. Even the surest patterns break. Risk management acknowledges this without judgment.

And finally, there is time.
Time may be the greatest risk manager of all.
Given enough years, the market has a way of smoothing its own rough edges, of lifting what once frightened us. Those who rush suffer most; those who endure often find peace.

When I finished explaining this to my son, he grew quiet in that thoughtful way he has. I could see him wrestling with the truth that risk will always be part of the journey. But I also saw a calm forming—an understanding that managing risk isn’t about hiding from uncertainty, but about carrying it wisely.

In the end, risk management is not a barrier against loss.
It’s a practice of remaining whole through the losses that inevitably come.
A way of protecting not just your money, but your peace, your patience, and your ability to stay in the market long enough for growth to unfold.

And that, I told him, is how we build portfolios that endure—
not by avoiding risk, but by learning how to live with it gently and well.

A follow-up to “When the Sky Confirms What the Analysts Are Afraid to Say”

Beyond Analyst Sentiment

The last piece published here was not a quiet market note. It was a convergence — a chart, a military intelligence analyst named Charlie Garcia, and a set of geopolitical conditions that had no business landing simultaneously except that they did. Oil pushing toward $120. Bonds selling off during a shooting war. Private credit gates closing at Blue Owl and Blackstone. Saturn conjunct Neptune in Aries — a configuration that hadn’t occurred since the mid-1800s — doing exactly what that configuration does: revealing that what looked permanent was contingent.

The argument was structural: this is not a cyclical disruption inside a stable trend. It is a fragility event inside a period when the system of assumptions itself is being renegotiated.

That piece ended with a specific claim. Jupiter turning direct in Cancer, Larry Williams’ 4-year cycle, and the separating Mars–North Node conjunction in Pisces all pointed toward a meaningful rally entry in late May — a recovery from whatever floor the geopolitical interval established. The floor, the piece argued, would be lower than where February started. The rally would come, but it would begin from different ground.

We are now in that interval. The Mars–North Node conjunction has not yet fully separated. The escalation pressure has not yet passed its peak. And the market structure — measured not by narrative but by the Monotonic Directional Indicator, the MDX — is showing exactly what you would expect to see in a period where the old pricing model no longer works cleanly and the new one has not yet been built.

The indices are divided. The structural integrity of higher highs is holding in two of the three primary instruments. The third has gone dark. That divergence is the subject of this analysis.

The Individual Heartbeats: SPY, QQQ, DIA

There is a particular kind of information that price charts don’t give you directly. They show you where the market went. They do not tell you whether the move was structurally sound — whether higher highs were being printed in sequence, with the kind of orderly cadence that distinguishes a trend from a series of accidental recoveries.

That is what the MDX measures. The blue line tracks the raw indicator: the monotonicity of higher highs in real time. The red line is the smoothed signal — a confirmation layer. The zero axis is equilibrium. Above it, the index is producing ordered, sequential higher highs. Below it, the sequence has broken and the market is printing lower highs with equal or greater consistency.

Three panels. Three very different stories right now.

SPY — The S&P 500 panel shows a market in the process of recovering structural integrity. After a stretch of volatile, non-directional movement — the blue line churning between roughly -0.4 and +0.4 without conviction — the MDX has crossed the zero axis with some force, and it is leading the red signal line upward. That sequencing matters. When the raw indicator runs ahead of the smoothed confirmation, it means the current higher-highs pattern is building momentum rather than simply echoing a prior move. The steps are becoming uniform again. The 80.43% continuation score in the stats table reflects this: the S&P is currently in a structural state where that trend is more likely to extend than to reverse.

QQQ — The NASDAQ-100 panel is the problem in this picture, and it is not a subtle one. Where the SPY is climbing with some conviction, the QQQ MDX is hovering at the zero line — not breaking above it with any sustained push, not collapsing below it into a clear downtrend, just grinding at equilibrium. The peaks in the blue line are lower than they were in prior months. The red signal line has not been consistently broken to the upside. In the individual stats column, QQQ registers FALSE for Trending Up and 0.00% for continuation probability. That is not a soft caution flag. That is the MDX stating, in the plainest terms it has, that the sequence of higher highs in the NASDAQ has not been present during this look-back window. Whatever the NASDAQ has been doing, it has not been trending in the structural sense this tool requires.

DIA — The Dow panel reads differently from both. Its MDX profile is smoother and more rounded — less volatile, less reactive, more consistent. The Dow has spent a meaningful portion of the recent look-back period in a stable, positive monotonic state, and the shape of the chart reflects that: long arcs rather than jagged crossings, the blue and red lines running close together with the blue maintaining its lead. The 79.69% continuation score matches what the chart shows. Right now, the Dow is the most structurally orderly of the three. In a market where the geopolitical environment has introduced sustained uncertainty, that consistency has a specific meaning: the capital that is trending is trending in the blue-chip industrial names, not in high-growth tech.

The Aggregate Picture — What 20% Actually Means

The aggregated NAS-DOW-SP view is where the individual readings become a verdict. Blending all three indices into a single macro signal forces a reckoning with what the divergence actually adds up to.

The dashboard as of March 6, 2026 shows:

• Trending Up: 14 periods

• Trending Down: 20 periods

• Continuing Up: 20.00%

• Continuation Down: 4.14%

The 20% continuation probability requires some unpacking, because it is easy to read it as a bearish signal and miss what it is actually saying. It is not saying the market is about to fall. The 4.14% continuation-down figure is the other side of that coin — the downside is equally incoherent. What 20% says is that only one in five monotonic cycles is successfully extending its run in either direction. The market cannot build. It is grinding.

The asymmetry between Trending Down (20) and Trending Up (14) means the aggregate weight of this period leans toward structural weakness. But neither side has the coordination required for a sustained directional move. There is no organized selling underway — no clean lower-highs sequence that would register as a monotonic bear trend. There is just friction. A market caught between two states, unable to commit to either.

The individual stats column is where the diagnostic gets precise. SPY at 80.43% and DIA at 79.69% are functioning. They are building. QQQ at 0.00% is not — and because all three feed the aggregate, QQQ’s absence drags the combined continuation probability down to the 20% ceiling. Two-thirds of the primary engines are pushing. One-third is stalled. A rally that depends on breadth across all three cannot clear that ceiling until the third engine re-engages.

This is the structural translation of what the prior piece described in macro terms: a period where the old pricing model no longer works cleanly. The SPY and DIA are attempting to rebuild. The NASDAQ — the index that led every major upswing of the prior cycle, the instrument most exposed to the interest rate and geopolitical dynamics currently in play — has stepped out of the trend entirely.

Under the Hood — The Industrial Engines

The MDX does not just track indices. It identifies, within those indices, the specific instruments producing the cleanest monotonic steps. The names currently surfaced in the Dow cluster are: DOW, BA, CVX, CMCSA, HON, CAT.

Read that list slowly. Caterpillar. Honeywell. Chevron. Boeing. These are not momentum trades. These are physical-economy companies — long-cycle businesses whose order books do not move on a single Federal Reserve statement or a single day of geopolitical headlines. Caterpillar runs on infrastructure spending cycles that span years. Honeywell’s industrial automation contracts are multi-year commitments. Chevron’s production assets do not reprice daily. Boeing, whatever its headline difficulties, carries a backlog measured in years of delivery.

These names are providing the orderly step-structure — the consistent higher highs — that the MDX rewards. When the QQQ reads FALSE and these six names are producing the only clean monotonic trends visible in the Dow complex, that is not a coincidence. It is a rotation signal expressed in the language of structural trend analysis.

The capital that is currently trending has moved from speculation to the industrial base. The “ordered” money — the money producing the consistent higher highs the MDX can detect — is sitting in names that have tangible assets, long-dated revenue, and some insulation from the specific fragilities the prior piece identified: rate sensitivity, geopolitical disruption to the semiconductor and AI infrastructure supply chains, the credit stress that lands hardest on high-multiple growth companies.

Without this cluster of names maintaining their structural integrity, the aggregate MDX would likely have already slipped into a fully negative regime. They are the reason the Dow’s continuation score remains near 80% while the NASDAQ sits at zero.

What the Analysts Are Missing

The current analyst consensus, reading the SPY’s recent recovery, is reaching for a broad-market green light. The MDX data does not support that read — not because the SPY is wrong, but because the SPY is not the whole picture.

Price targets are a distraction in a period like this. A stock that gains ten points in a single chaotic session is invisible to the MDX. A stock that gains one point per day for two weeks, consistently, with higher highs each time, is exactly what this tool looks for. The distinction matters because the geopolitical and macro environment described in the prior piece — the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries, the Mars–North Node applying aspect in Pisces, the fragility chains Garcia identified around the Strait, the private credit stress — creates precisely the conditions where price spikes without structural follow-through. Noise that looks like signal.

The strategic picture the data suggests is not complicated. Weight toward the monotonic leaders in the Dow cluster and the recovering SPY. Maintain a cautious posture on broad NASDAQ exposure until the QQQ MDX produces a clear, sustained crossing above the zero axis and registers a TRUE trending-up status. Do not interpret the SPY’s 80% continuation score as permission to treat the aggregate as healthy — it is not healthy yet. It is two-thirds healthy, and the missing third is the one most directly exposed to the pressures this period is generating.

The threshold to watch is the aggregate “Continuing Up” probability. At 20%, it is a ceiling. When it breaks meaningfully above 50% — when the NASDAQ re-engages and the three engines are pulling in the same direction — that is the structural confirmation that the new floor referenced in the prior piece has been established and the May rally is becoming the trend, not just a bounce.

Until that happens, the 20% ceiling is the honest read.

The Verdict

Market sentiment is an editorial. The MDX is arithmetic.

The prior piece argued that the floor from which the late May rally launches will be different from the floor February started from — that the interval between the Saturn–Neptune ignition and the Jupiter-direct re-engagement would be a period of repricing, of fragility chains expressing themselves in asset markets, of the old model no longer pricing correctly and the new one not yet built.

What the MDX is showing as of this writing is consistent with that interval. The broader market and the industrials are fighting to hold structural order. Tech has stepped back from the trend. The aggregate continuation probability — 20% — is the market’s own structural admission that it cannot sustain a directional move across all three primary instruments simultaneously.

This is not a crash signal. The downside continuation is equally incoherent, equally unable to sustain itself. This is a grinding, high-friction, directionally uncertain period — exactly what you would expect in the window the prior analysis described.

Jupiter will turn direct. The Mars–North Node separation will complete. The May entry point Williams identified will arrive. The structural recovery the SPY and DIA are attempting to build will eventually have the NASDAQ with it, or it won’t sustain.

Watch the QQQ MDX. When the NASDAQ starts producing clean, sequential higher highs again — when the blue line crosses the zero axis and holds, when the continuation score climbs out of zero and the trending-up status flips from FALSE to TRUE — that is the signal that the third engine has re-engaged. That is when the aggregate ceiling lifts and the broad-market rally has the structural foundation to be something more than two-thirds of a trend.

Until then: the sky confirms what the structure shows. The market is not broken. But it is not whole.

Ryan Hunt is an astrologer, enterprise architect, and publisher of Market Watching the Moon. The MDX (Monotonic Directional Indicator) is a proprietary oscillator measuring the monotonicity of higher highs across index and individual equity data. Nothing published here constitutes financial advice.

There is a particular quality of attention that settles in when several systems — systems with no knowledge of each other, built from different premises, using different tools — begin pointing at the same moment. I have learned to take that quality of attention seriously. Not because convergence is proof. But because it is rare enough to warrant sitting with.

Right now I am sitting with it.

On one side: a chart. The transits for March 9, 2026, cast for Berkeley, California, at 1:13 in the afternoon. On the other: a military intelligence analyst named , writing from “somewhere on the internet with three bourbons and forty years of pattern recognition,” who spent February telling his readers that Wall Street was asleep and March explaining that he had been right. Between them: a set of headlines that would have seemed implausible eighteen months ago. Oil pushing toward $120. Bonds selling off — not rallying, selling — during a geopolitical crisis. G7 officials discussing oil reserve releases and not quite agreeing to do it. An American carrier group in the Arabian Sea. Another one crossing the Atlantic ahead of schedule.

The chart and the analyst have reached the same place by different roads.

I want to start with the chart because that is the discipline I practice, and because I think it offers something Garcia’s analysis — which is brilliant and worth reading twice — does not. Garcia is working forward from evidence: what does the military posture tell us about likely action? What does the force architecture reveal about fragility? What does the logistics math say about duration?

The chart works backward from pattern: what is the structural period? What cycles are igniting? What has been building for years and is now arriving?

When both directions of inquiry land at the same coordinates, I find that more interesting than either one alone.

What the Sky is Actually Doing

Saturn and Neptune are conjunct in Aries. The exact conjunction has just passed — as of March 9 they sit at 2°47’ and 1°22’ respectively, separating by 1°25’. That sounds like old news. It is not. In astronomical time, 1°25’ of separation is the morning after. The energy of a conjunction does not evaporate when it goes exact and begins to separate. It is still the conjunction. The door just opened.

This particular conjunction has not happened in Aries since the mid-1800s. The Saturn–Neptune cycle runs approximately 36 years. The conjunctions in each successive sign carry the signature of that sign. Aries is where new things begin. It is cardinal fire — the first initiating impulse, the spark before the structure. Saturn meeting Neptune at Aries 0-2° means that a new ideological and structural cycle is beginning under conditions of maximal uncertainty. Saturn wants definition. Neptune dissolves definition. Their meeting at the start of Aries asks: what is the new order being built, and how much of what we think we know about it is illusion?

History has answered this question before. The Saturn–Neptune conjunction in 1917 coincided with the collapse of the old imperial order and the emergence of revolutionary new ones. The 1989 conjunction corresponded with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War architecture. The 1953 iteration settled into the Cold War’s consolidation — not an ending but a hardening of the new shape.

Each time: a prior structure that seemed permanent was revealed to be contingent. And a new configuration was beginning under conditions where nobody yet knew what it would look like.

I am not saying 2026 is 1917. I am saying the sky is doing the same thing it does when a civilizational assumption is being tested.

The Pisces Cluster

Running alongside the Saturn–Neptune story is something more immediate. Mars is at Pisces 5°, the North Node is at Pisces 8°, and Mercury is retrograde at Pisces 14° — all in the 9th house of international affairs and ideology. The Sun is at Pisces 19°. An entire cluster of meaning sitting in the sign of oceans and hidden things, in the house of foreign policy and global reach.

Mars conjunct the North Node in Pisces is a fated military action in an oceanic or covert domain. The word “fated” sounds mystical but it means something specific here: the North Node represents the direction the cycle is moving toward. Mars conjunct it means military energy moving in that direction, with the inexorable quality of an applying aspect — the orb is still closing. The conjunction has not yet perfected. Escalation is still ahead of us, not behind.

Pisces rules oceans. Naval corridors. Submarines. Mines. The things that move below the surface of events. When I read about the Strait of Hormuz — 21 miles wide, 20 million barrels of oil per day, the point where a single mine incident and an insurance pricing cascade can do more damage than a military defeat — I see Mars in Pisces conjunct the North Node. This is not metaphor. This is the domain of the aspect.

Mercury retrograde in Pisces adds the intelligence fog. Mercury retrograde is a well-known phenomenon, usually experienced as communication delays and logistical confusion. In Pisces, its own sign of debility, the retrograde goes deeper than logistics. What officials say and what is happening become structurally diverged. I keep reading the statement that “G7 officials have broad agreement not to release oil reserves just yet.” I keep reading Iran’s foreign minister insisting that missiles were never on the agenda, while the US insists they must be. Garcia put it this way: these are two countries describing two different negotiations. Mercury retrograde in Pisces conjunct the North Node in the house of international affairs. That is the astrological statement for “the signal environment is unreliable and the confusion is the condition, not the obstacle to clarity.”

The US Chart Speaks

I need to talk about the United States natal chart because it does something instructive — and, when read correctly, more unsettling than anything theatrical — when placed next to the event chart for Operation Epic Fury: the American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities ordered on February 27, 2026, at 11:08 PM Tehran time.

The US chart, cast for July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, has a remarkable signature in its 8th house. The Sun is there, in Cancer at 13°19’. Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter join it, all in Cancer. The 8th house is the house of debt, transformation, shared resources, and hidden wealth. The US became the world’s dominant power not primarily through military force alone but through the architecture of capital — the reserve currency, the bond market, the system of global debt and credit that runs through New York and Washington. This is an 8th-house Cancer stellium expressing itself at civilizational scale. Power through resource control. Power through financial structures that others depend on.

Mars sits in the US chart at Gemini 21°, in the 7th house of open enemies and partnerships. Gemini rules air, communication, intelligence, and — by extension — the kinds of warfare conducted through those channels. Drones. Cyber operations. Signals intelligence. The US war-making function has always carried a Gemini quality.

What the cross-chart geometry between these two charts actually shows is not the clean symbolic story I wanted it to be. There are no exact conjunctions between the US natal planets and the Epic Fury event planets. What there is instead is a cluster of tight applying semi-squares and contra-parallels — and the more I sit with it, the more accurate that signature feels for what this operation actually is.

The tightest contact: US natal Mars contra-parallel Epic Fury Pluto, within 9 arc minutes, applying. A contra-parallel operates through declination — it is an opposition that runs through shadow channels rather than the ecliptic plane. US natal Mars (Gemini, 7th house — the war-making function, the drone and cyber signature) in near-exact hidden opposition to Epic Fury Pluto (compulsive structural transformation, elimination, the unresolvable). Raw military capacity meeting systemic transformation, but the contact is oblique. The force is not declared. It runs underneath.

Right behind it: US natal Mars semi-square the Epic Fury North Node, within 13 arc minutes, applying. And US natal Mercury semi-square Epic Fury Uranus, within 16 arc minutes, applying. The intelligence apparatus (Mercury, Cancer 8th, retrograde in the natal — already carrying the signature of covert intelligence rather than open declaration) at a friction angle with sudden disruption. The military capacity at a compression angle with the destiny axis.

Semi-squares are the aspect of pressure that accumulates without obvious release. They do not announce themselves. They build. The US natal Mars is not conjunct anything in the Epic Fury chart. It is semi-squaring the North Node and contra-paralleling Pluto. The war-making function is engaged, but through channels that are neither transparent nor direct.

This is an accurate description of what Operation Epic Fury is. No congressional authorization. No regional allies willing to host offensive strikes. B-2 bombers from Missouri, a cyber operation through shadow channels, submarine-launched cruise missiles from international waters. An operation designed specifically not to look like what it is until it has already happened. The chart doesn’t give us a dramatic exact conjunction. It gives us a 9-arc-minute contra-parallel and a cluster of semi-squares. That is the correct geometry for a covert raid ordered at 11 PM.

US natal Sun square Epic Fury Saturn — 1°29’, applying. The national identity (Cancer Sun, 8th house) under institutional constraint from the event’s Saturn. No allied authorization. No legal framework. Governance pressure bearing down on the decision to act. This is the constitutional tension Garcia identifies: a military operation of historic scale conducted without Congressional authorization, without a single willing regional partner, and with every country within 500 miles having publicly said no.

US natal Mars square Epic Fury Neptune — 1°02’, applying. The war-making function in fog. Military action under conditions of fundamental strategic ambiguity. The “raid vs. campaign” distinction Garcia keeps returning to is embedded here: Neptune dissolves the clean campaign logic. Mars acts anyway, into conditions where the outcome cannot be clearly seen.

What the cross-chart aspects tell us — and this is the thing I find genuinely interesting — is that the geometry of the operation matches its character. Grand conjunctions describe declared wars with clear authority and broad alliance. Semi-squares and contra-parallels describe covert pressure applied through oblique channels by a power acting without the institutional architecture that normally validates such action. The sky described this operation before it happened. Just not in the language I initially reached for.

Garcia and the Bond Market

Charlie Garcia published something on February 11 that 23,000 people read, most of whom apparently forwarded it to someone who told them they were overreacting. He then published a follow-up on March 7 in which he noted, gently, that he had been right.

His core analytical move — the one that separates his work from headline summarizing — is to reframe the conflict. Iran is not trying to defeat the American military. Iran is trying to break the American financial system.

The mechanism: military action in the Gulf elevates oil prices. Elevated oil prices sustain inflation. Sustained inflation prevents the Federal Reserve from cutting rates. Rates held high force approximately $5 trillion in corporate debt to roll over at current costs. That rolling debt creates stress in corporate earnings. Stress in corporate earnings widens credit spreads. Widening credit spreads pressure the private credit market — $1.8 trillion of semi-liquid assets marked quarterly, not daily. Pressure in private credit triggers redemption requests. Redemptions trigger forced selling. Forced selling creates correlation across asset classes at exactly the moment when everything else is already stressed.

Iran’s strategic planners, Garcia is suggesting, understand this chain. They do not need to win a naval battle. They need to keep the Strait partially disrupted long enough for American inflation to do what Iranian missiles cannot.

I read this and looked at the US natal chart. The 8th house Cancer stellium is the bond market. It is the reserve currency. It is the financial architecture that makes America’s global power possible. The current Pluto transit through Aquarius is running through the 8th house of the current sky — transforming network-level debt structures at a systemic level.

The cross-chart geometry between US natal and Epic Fury confirms the financial dimension without requiring poetic license. US natal Venus — Cancer 8th, the financial valuation function — applies toward conjunction with Epic Fury Jupiter within 2°49’. The economic stakes of the operation are expansive. US natal Sun squares Epic Fury Saturn within 1°29’: the national identity under institutional constraint, the sovereign power of the reserve currency meeting structural limits. The 8th house story is present in the aspects. It arrives through compression and friction rather than grand conjunction, which is appropriate — debt crises rarely announce themselves with fanfare.

Garcia reached his conclusion through military analysis and macro economics. I reached the same place by reading the chart. When independent systems converge, I pay attention.

The Fragilities

Garcia organized his analysis around four single points of failure, each of which, if it failed, would transform Operation Epic Fury from a surgical raid into an extended regional war. I want to map each one to the current astrological field, not to validate Garcia through astrology or to validate astrology through Garcia, but because the correspondences are instructive.

The first fragility is the cyber key. US Cyber Command reportedly penetrated Iran’s integrated air defense network in June 2025, turning the entire system into expensive hardware that wouldn’t fire. The question now is whether that access remains viable after eight months of Iranian hardening, assisted by Chinese cybersecurity teams. Garcia puts confidence at 65-70%. Mercury retrograde in Pisces conjunct the North Node says the same thing differently: the tool works, but under conditions of unreliability, and the unreliability is structural, not fixable by adding more information.

The second fragility is one aircraft carrier. The USS Abraham Lincoln is the sole operational carrier in theater. Its flight deck is the only tactical airfield available for real-time targeting of mobile missile launchers — the ones that will fire at Tel Aviv if the campaign degrades. Iran has spent years developing the specific countermeasures for exactly this scenario. Moon square Mars in the current sky — logistical and military tension — with Moon in opposition to Uranus in Taurus: sudden commodity shock transmitted through the supply network. A fouled flight deck is one Uranus transit to the Moon. A drone swarm impact is the same. The carrier doesn’t need to sink. It needs to become uncertain enough that the kill chain breaks.

The third fragility is the one that could widen this into something no financial model currently prices. Russian military technicians almost certainly operate the S-400 batteries Iran received near Isfahan. Chinese personnel almost certainly accompanied the HQ-9 systems. If those batteries are destroyed — because physics demands that an active SAM site tracking a B-2 dies regardless of who is sitting inside — Russian and Chinese personnel die. In Korea and Vietnam and Syria, when that happened, there was plausible deniability. There is no plausible deniability in the satellite age. Pluto in Aquarius — networks, data, visibility — ensures that. Moscow will know within hours. Beijing will have imagery within the day.

The fourth fragility is time itself. Cyber weapons degrade with each passing day as discovery probability increases. Pilots fatigue. The Gulf states that are currently permitting defensive operations and airspace transit, while publicly refusing to host offensive strikes, have a tolerance window. A Swedish naval analyst noted that the buildup “can be sustained for a while, but needs to be either withdrawn or used eventually.” Saturn conjunct Neptune in Aries with Venus joining the cluster: the structure (Saturn) is subject to dissolution (Neptune) and the financial stakes (Venus) are visible to everyone (Aries, cardinal, initiating). The clock is the configuration.

The Duration Question

Of everything Garcia has written, the most important analytical contribution is the distinction between a raid and a campaign.

A raid depends on a set of assumptions holding simultaneously. If they hold, it looks like genius. If they don’t, you are in a fight you did not plan for and are not equipped to sustain. A campaign has depth, redundancy, logistics, and the ability to absorb setbacks. Desert Storm was a campaign. Six months of preparation. Thirty-five allies. A thousand runways.

This operation has two aircraft carriers, bombers in Missouri, and a cyber key that may or may not turn.

The market implications bifurcate entirely on duration. A 48-hour oil spike and a structural three-month Hormuz disruption produce different asset class outcomes, different inflation trajectories, different credit scenarios, different central bank decisions. Investors who treat them as the same trade with different magnitudes are making the same error Garcia identifies everywhere: pricing the event rather than the fragility chain.

Mars applying to the North Node in Pisces through the spring says: this is not a moment of one-day volatility. The aspect is still closing. Weeks of elevated risk, not a spike and a resolution.

What the Numbers Look Like

Garcia’s scenario architecture is worth holding alongside the transit field as we move through the coming weeks.

A surgical raid — his 25% probability — produces the Uranus jolt without the structural damage: oil spikes to $85-95 and settles as OPEC spare capacity fills the gap, gold gives back its fear premium, the Aries initiating energy of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction begins the new cycle without the dissolution phase going critical. Mercury turns direct in late March. Clarity returns to the signal environment.

An extended regional war — his 35%, most probable single outcome — looks structurally different. Oil holds $110-130 elevated for weeks during mine clearance operations. Shipping insurance premiums, already up substantially since June, go parabolic. Gold breaks through $6,000. Treasury yields spike on war premium, then rally on flight-to-safety as credit stress deepens. High-yield spreads widen from their current historic tights near 2.83 toward the 5-6 range we last saw in 2022. Private credit redemption gates — already appearing at Blue Owl and Blackstone — open at more funds. The Citrini positioning (30% cash, HYGH short, June SPX calls as the lottery ticket on normalization) starts to look like the correct architecture.

The systemic scenario — his 25% — is the one that involves closed Strait, carrier damage, Russian or Chinese military personnel killed, sleeper cell activation on American soil, and 400 kilograms of enriched uranium unaccounted for in a fracturing state. Gold goes parabolic. Equities enter correction. The 60/40 portfolio stops working because it was designed for a world where none of these things happen simultaneously.

The question I keep returning to is not which scenario will occur. It is whether the current market pricing implies any serious consideration of the third and fourth scenarios at all. My read is that it does not. The chart suggests those scenarios remain within the probability mass for this window. That is the trade.

May 27 and What Comes After

I want to end where Garcia ends, because I think he is right and the astrology supports it.

The damage is not permanent. Jupiter is retrograde in Cancer at 15°, moving toward the Ascendant. It will turn direct. The national expansion energy will re-engage. Larry Williams’ 4-year cycle, which has correctly identified every major market low since 1970, projects a decline window opening around March 15 and a powerful rally from May onward, with May 27 as the most promising entry point. He has announced that he will not answer subscriber emails because he is too busy preparing for the May-June buy point.

Jupiter turning direct in Cancer corresponds to this timing. Cancer is the sign of the homeland, of emotional and economic security, of resources close to home. Jupiter direct there means the expansion principle re-engages at the level of domestic resource and national confidence. The Mars-North Node conjunction in Pisces will have separated by then. The escalation pressure will have passed its peak.

The hard assets Garcia has been recommending — gold, silver, the miners, energy producers, Bitcoin — are not a panic trade. They are the portfolio architecture for the interval between Saturn-Neptune igniting a new cycle and the new cycle establishing enough stability to price normally. They hold their value in the window where the old model no longer prices correctly and the new one has not yet been built.

I will be honest about where this analysis has limits.

Garcia’s specific operational claims — the persistence of CYBERCOM access, the exact number of Russian technicians, the precise details of the deconfliction channels — are not independently verifiable from open sources. He writes in a high-voltage style that requires calibration. Some of what he presents as confirmed is inference, even if well-informed inference.

The astrology does not verify his intelligence claims. What it does is confirm his structural argument: that this is a fragility event inside a structural period, not a cyclical event inside a stable trend. The configurations say what he says. The method of arrival is different. The destination is the same.

I have been practicing astrology long enough to know that convergence is not certainty. Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in Aries do not always produce civilizational restructuring — they produce the conditions for it, and circumstances determine the degree of expression. Mars conjunct the North Node in Pisces does not guarantee a Hormuz incident — it marks the domain and the direction.

But I have also been practicing long enough to know that when the chart and the intelligence analysis and the macro data all point at the same window, I do not dismiss any of them simply because the others exist.

The world is more expensive because it has become less secure.

That sentence arrived in the original Market Watching the Moon draft, before the charts, before Garcia, before the analysis that forms this piece. I keep returning to it because it is the plainest statement of what the Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries is asking us to understand.

Saturn and Neptune meeting at the beginning of Aries are not describing a temporary disruption to a stable system. They are describing a moment when the system itself — the system of assumptions about what is permanent, what is recoverable, what the floor is — is being renegotiated.

Oil at $120 is visible. Bonds selling during a war is legible, if you know where to look. The private credit gates closing is quietly audible if you read the footnotes. The 400 kilograms of enriched uranium that nobody can locate is the thing that exists entirely outside any financial model currently in use.

The market will find a bottom. Jupiter will turn direct. Williams will deploy his cash and not answer his email. The rally will come.

But the floor that May 27 rally starts from will be different from the floor that February started from.

That is what the sky is saying.

That is what I am watching.

My son feels that tug too. He came to me one afternoon with a look I remembered from my own early investing days—the anxious urgency that whispers, Should I sell right now? Am I already too late? He held the list in his hand like it was a ticking clock, fearing that every second he waited was a second the market might turn against him.

I told him what I wish someone had told me years ago:
A change in the list is not a command. It’s an invitation to pause.

The world of investing often teaches us to move fast—buy quickly, sell quickly, react quickly. But nothing meaningful grows from haste. When a stock leaves the portfolio, it doesn’t mean the company has suddenly become weak or unworthy. Most of the time, it simply means that another company now meets the criteria more strongly. Strength shifts. Patterns evolve. The market breathes in and out, and the list reflects that rhythm.

If we were to sell immediately, automatically, we would be treating the portfolio like an alarm system rather than a guide. But the portfolio was never meant to shout at anyone. It was meant to whisper.

When a stock drops from the list, I prefer to watch it first.
Has its drawdown deepened?
Has its trend meaningfully broken?
Or is it simply resting, taking a breath the way all companies do from time to time?

I told my son that selling should feel like an understanding, not a reaction. We sell not because the list changed, but because we understand why it changed. And if that understanding isn’t there yet, then the only right response is to wait.

Waiting is its own kind of wisdom. It teaches us to trust our process, not just the signals it produces. It reminds us that investing is not a sprint from one update to the next—it’s a long conversation with the market, and rushed conversations rarely lead to truth.

Most of the stocks that exit the Lunar Landing Portfolio are still excellent companies. They’re still strong contributors to the market. They’re often still growing. The criteria simply identified another stock whose stability or performance currently shines brighter. That doesn’t make the departing stock suddenly wrong to hold—it only means the portfolio is evolving.

There’s a tenderness in acknowledging that evolution.
A portfolio, like a person, changes over time.
It learns, adapts, refines itself.

The question isn’t “Should I sell immediately?”
The question is “Does this change still align with who I am as an investor?”

For some people, the answer will be yes—they want their holdings to mirror the list precisely, shifting each time the list shifts. That is a valid choice, rooted in a desire for alignment and consistency.

For others, the answer is more nuanced. They may choose to sell gradually, easing out of the position over several weeks. Or they may choose to hold until a clearer picture emerges. Selling becomes a deliberate exhale rather than a gasp.

When I explained this to my son, I saw something settle in him—a loosening, a softening of the urgent energy he carried. He realized that the list is a guidepost, not a deadline. And that he has permission to breathe before he acts.

In the end, the market will always move faster than we can. But our decisions don’t have to mimic that speed. They can be slow, thoughtful, grounded in understanding rather than fear. When the list changes, the first thing to do is simple:

Pause.
Reflect.
Let the decision come to you, quietly, when it’s ready.

Selling is not a race.
It’s an act of clarity—and clarity takes time.

I think about my son, who approached me not long ago with a kind of restless energy—equal parts eagerness and doubt. “Can I really rely on your list?” he asked me. “Or do I need to figure everything out myself?” His question carried the weight of someone standing at the beginning of a long path, unsure which step is his to take.

I told him what I’ve come to believe deeply:
You can lean on the Lunar Landing Portfolio while learning to stand on your own.
You can hold the rails until your balance comes.

There is no shame in beginning with guidance. We all learn this way—by watching, imitating, trusting the scaffolding someone else built before we build our own. The portfolio isn’t meant to be a permanent crutch. It’s a temporary home, a structure sturdy enough to shelter your early confidence but spacious enough to let you grow beyond it.

Every stock in the Lunar Landing Portfolio was chosen through a methodical process—five-year returns, rolling-year windows, maximum drawdowns, stability, consistency, contribution to the larger market. When you use the portfolio, you’re not just copying a list; you’re stepping into a way of seeing. Over time, you begin to notice patterns yourself. You start asking the same questions I ask when updating the list. And slowly, the act of investing shifts from dependence to understanding.

I wanted my son to feel that—this gentle transition. I wanted him to know that relying on the list is not a sign of weakness; it’s an act of learning. But I also wanted him to feel the invitation embedded in it: Learn the method behind it. Grow into your own decision-making.

There’s a moment every investor reaches, a kind of inner turning point. One day you’re simply following guidance, and the next day something clicks—an intuition, a pattern, a sudden familiarity with the data that once felt overwhelming. You look at a stock and see more than a ticker symbol. You see stories encoded in lines and numbers. And without realizing it, you begin trusting yourself.

My hope is that the Lunar Landing Portfolio becomes a bridge to that moment.

Some people will stay with the portfolio long-term, and that’s fine. Others will drift away from it, not out of dismissal but out of growth. In both cases, the portfolio has served its purpose. It has supported them while they learned to listen to the market’s quieter messages, the ones hidden beneath volatility and noise.

I told my son that he doesn’t need to rush this transition. The portfolio will always be there for him—revised weekly, shaped with intention, grounded in the criteria that have carried me through my own investing seasons. But I also reminded him that one day he may outgrow it, and that will be a moment of pride, not loss.

In the end, learning to analyze stocks is like learning to know yourself. It takes time, mistakes, reflection, and the slow accumulation of understanding. The Lunar Landing Portfolio is simply a place to begin—a steady guide until your own instincts become steady enough to trust.

And when that day comes, you won’t need the portfolio to choose for you.
You’ll simply let it walk beside you, no longer a map, but a memory of where you started.

I call them strong contributors.

My son asked me once what I meant by that phrase. To him, a strong contributor is a company that grows fast, that delivers big returns, that captures the imagination of investors. But strength, I’ve learned, doesn’t always look like acceleration. Sometimes it looks like consistency. Sometimes it looks like stability. Sometimes it looks like the quiet persistence of a business rising year after year, not in leaps but in steps.

A strong contributor is the kind of company whose movement can nudge an entire index—especially the S&P 500, where size and influence intertwine. These companies don’t merely participate in the market; they shape it. When they rise, the market rises with them. When they falter, the market feels the tremor.

But influence alone doesn’t make them strong. What sets them apart is character.

They tend to have lower drawdowns than their peers, falling less sharply when the world becomes uncertain. They recover faster, steadier, as though they have a memory of resilience encoded in their foundations. They produce returns above the average—not always spectacular, but reliably better, like a slow, rising tide lifting everything around it.

When I study these stocks, I often find myself thinking about the people in my life who have carried me quietly through difficult seasons—not with grand gestures, but with a steadiness I could rely on. Strong contributors feel the same. They don’t demand attention. They don’t lure investors with promises of meteoric climbs. They simply keep growing, keep delivering, keep showing up.

When I explained this to my son, I could see his perspective shifting. He’d grown accustomed to thinking of the market as a place where the bold succeed and the cautious fade. But strong contributors defy that narrative. They remind us that strength often reveals itself in the calmest movements.

These are companies with meaningful economic influence. Businesses with deep roots—ones that build products people cannot live without, that maintain infrastructures we rarely think about, that keep entire sectors upright even when uncertainty sweeps across the market. Their growth may not dazzle, but their presence anchors the indexes we rely on.

And because they tend to have lower volatility and higher consistency, they form the backbone of a stable portfolio. Not the exciting part, perhaps, but the part that allows an investor to sleep through turbulent nights without wondering whether everything will collapse by morning.

If a portfolio is a body, strong contributors are the bones—quiet, supportive, essential.

When I think about the Lunar Landing Portfolio, many of the companies that rise to the top of its criteria fall into this category. They are the ones whose five-year returns surpass the average, whose rolling-year performance remains steady, whose drawdowns are softer than the storms surrounding them. I choose them not because they promise glory, but because they offer reliability.

In the end, a strong contributor is simply a company that shows up—year after year, cycle after cycle—carrying the weight of the market not with spectacle, but with endurance.

And in a world that celebrates the companies that shout the loudest, I’ve learned to treasure the ones that whisper their strength through steady, upward movement.

I used to resist these methods. Moving averages felt too abstract, trend lines too reductive, the Dogs of the Dow too quaint. But time has softened those edges in me. I’ve realized that these approaches don’t replace the deeper analysis—they complement it. Each one offers another way of seeing, another angle of truth.

The 200-day moving average, for instance, has become something of a compass for many investors. It smooths out the noise, stripping away the chaos of daily volatility and revealing the shape of a stock’s long-term direction. I used to think it was too simple, too mechanical—until I began watching how faithfully many companies hovered around that line, how crossings above or below it often marked subtle shifts in sentiment. Not certainties, just murmurs. But sometimes a murmur is enough to remind us that the market moves with a rhythm more stable than we assume.

Trend lines, too, carry their own quiet wisdom. They feel almost artistic to me—lines drawn not to constrain but to understand. A trend line doesn’t tell us where a stock must go; it tells us how it has behaved, the slope of its journey, the persistence of its direction. I’ve come to appreciate the gentle discipline of these lines. They remind me to look not just at numbers but at movement, the subtle tilts that suggest whether a stock is climbing with conviction or drifting with uncertainty.

And then there’s the Dogs of the Dow, an old-fashioned strategy that almost feels like advice passed down from a grandfather sitting on a porch swing. Take the highest-yielding stocks in the Dow, invest in them at the start of the year, and let time do the rest. At first glance, it seems too simple to belong in modern markets. But simplicity has its own kind of wisdom. The Dogs strategy reminds me that sometimes the market’s largest, most stable companies offer better opportunities than the shiny new names we chase for excitement.

Each of these methods—moving averages, trend lines, the Dogs—feels like a different kind of question asked of the market. A moving average asks, Where is the momentum carrying us?
A trend line asks, What direction has endured?
The Dogs of the Dow ask, Where has value been overlooked?

None of them offer certainty. But all of them offer perspective.

When I explained this to my son, he listened with that subtle intensity he gets when he’s trying to weave new ideas into his understanding. I could see him beginning to grasp something that took me years to accept: that no single method holds the whole truth. Investing isn’t about finding the one perfect tool—it’s about building a toolkit, a way of seeing the market from multiple angles until the picture feels honest.

What I wish for him, and for anyone learning this craft, is an openness to these methods. Not a blind faith, but a willingness to let each one teach something. To see technical indicators not as rigid rules but as quiet companions, suggesting patterns we may have missed.

In the end, all analysis methods—simple or complex, traditional or modern—are just ways of paying attention.
And the more ways we learn to listen, the more clearly the market begins to speak.

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We’ve been here before, haven’t we? On the edge of a pivot, where innovation’s bloom begins to wilt under the weight of valuation, and the old stalwarts—industrials, consumer staples, and energy—return to the foreground, not because they’ve changed, but because the world has. Growth, for all its dazzle, has always needed gravity to find its place. And this week, gravity came in the form of value: large-cap value stocks rose 2.2% even as their growth counterparts retreated. Gold surged back, silver faltered. Bitcoin whiplashed, losing 17% on the week. Confusion reigned, but it wasn’t chaos—it was recalibration.

Above us, Aquarius gathered its council. The Sun, Mars, Venus, and Pluto—all in the sign of the future, the disruptor, the rebel. There’s a pattern to this kind of alignment, a kind of electricity. When the sky leans Aquarian, we feel it in our bones: the itch to change, to revolutionize, to break what no longer serves. But we also feel the resistance. And that resistance is loudest in the markets that have been leading the charge—tech, crypto, innovation-heavy sectors—now burdened by their own expectations.

The volatility midweek wasn’t just about rates or earnings—it was emotional, instinctive. The Moon in Scorpio doesn’t play nice. It digs, excavates, reveals the undercurrents no analyst wants to put in a chart. There’s fear here—fear of overreach, of inflated dreams, of the unknown. And with Mercury tangled in Pisces alongside Saturn, our tools for understanding it—data, communication, consensus—are clouded, warped, almost dreamlike. It’s a week where clarity slips through your fingers, just when you need it most.

And then there’s Mars conjunct Pluto in Aquarius. If you’ve ever felt the ground shift under your feet without warning, you know this energy. It’s the signature of breakdown and rebirth, of tectonic restructuring. For markets, this means more than just volatility—it suggests structural change, especially in the systems we take for granted. Digital assets, regulatory frameworks, even the narratives we use to explain the economy—all are up for review. Not revision. Reinvention.

Yet within the tremors, there are signals. Consumer sentiment is rising. Not wildly, not with euphoria, but steadily. The Michigan Index touched 57.3, still shy of last year’s numbers, but the trajectory matters. People—ordinary people—are feeling a little more hopeful. Maybe it’s the inflation slowdown, maybe it’s the labor market holding firm, or maybe it’s just the subtle whisper of spring. Whatever it is, it’s enough.

Internationally, things are equally bifurcated. Japan shines. China stumbles. Latin America finds footing. Europe cools. Everywhere, there’s motion without direction. A tide shifting, but not yet revealing where it’s headed.

What does it all mean? That we’re in the middle. Between the old world and the new. Between growth and value. Between what was promised and what can actually hold. And that middle is uncomfortable—it demands patience, awareness, and humility.

The astrology suggests this liminal space will linger, at least for a while longer. Mercury will continue to confuse. Saturn will demand structure where none exists. And the Mars-Pluto alignment will force truth to the surface, whether we’re ready or not.

There’s no shortcut through it. No easy trade. No guaranteed hedge. Just the steady work of watching, waiting, and adjusting.

This is not a time to chase. It is a time to prepare.

Let the winds shift. And when they do—move with them.

My son doesn’t always see it that way. When we talk about investing, he gravitates toward the excitement—the narratives, the potential, the futuristic promises of technologies just beginning to awaken. And I remember being like that, measuring opportunity by the spark it lit in me. But sparks fade quickly. Data endures.

I told him recently that selecting stocks is, in many ways, a big data problem—one made of rolling windows, drawdowns, moving averages, trend lines, earnings rhythms, economic tides. At first, he gave me that look of his, the one that mixes hesitation with curiosity. I could almost hear the unspoken question: Doesn’t that make investing cold? Mechanical? Lifeless?

But to me, data isn’t lifeless. It’s a record of life—every rise, every fall, every breath the market has taken. When you look at enough numbers long enough, you begin to see patterns that feel almost poetic in their repetition. Cycles that echo one another. Behaviors that reveal themselves in the quiet margins of charts and spreadsheets.

The way I analyze stocks now wasn’t built overnight. It grew slowly from years of watching companies stumble and recover, expand and contract. I began to notice that those fluctuations weren’t random—they were patterned. They carried histories. They told the truth about a company more honestly than any press release ever could.

Turning stock selection into a data problem didn’t strip away the humanity for me—it clarified it. I began to see volatility as temperament, drawdown as resilience, rolling-year strength as consistency of character. Data didn’t erase the soul of the market; it helped me finally see it.

But the real gift of treating investing this way is the calm it brings. The market can be loud, overwhelming, emotional. It’s easy to get swept into fear or excitement, to make decisions rooted in impulse rather than intention. When you approach it as a data problem, the noise quiets. You step back. You measure. You breathe. Decisions become less about reaction and more about recognition—seeing what has already been revealed.

I told my son that even Bitcoin, the asset he loves to track, can be understood through data. The way it dances around its 200-day moving average, the way momentum shifts, the way its cycles echo their own history. He nodded then, because he’s felt that rhythm too—even if he didn’t have words for it yet.

The beauty of big data isn’t its complexity. It’s its honesty. It shows what happened—not what we wish happened. And in that honesty, we learn to trust ourselves more deeply.

So yes, stock selection is a big data problem. But it is also a kind of meditation. The patient gathering of truth. The slow uncovering of structure. The realization that the future may always be uncertain, but the patterns that brought us here are anything but.

In the end, data doesn’t replace intuition—it strengthens it.
And when the two finally meet, investing begins to feel less like guessing and more like understanding.
A quiet knowing.
A steadying presence in a world that often moves too fast.

The stocks featured in this portfolio do not represent a fixed buy-and-hold selection from a decade ago, but rather the result of an ongoing, dynamic investment process. This basket reflects the best-in-class equities as of today — companies that have proven their strength through recent performance, macro alignment, and technical resilience. The strategy is rooted in disciplined dollar-cost averaging: investing equal amounts into high-conviction names at regular intervals. Over time, this builds core positions in persistent outperformers. During scheduled reviews, underperformers are systematically removed, allowing only the strongest stocks to remain. Through this process, the portfolio evolves into a concentrated set of 20–25 equities that consistently outperform — not just relative to the S&P 500, but often exceeding even the NASDAQ 100’s benchmark returns.

🧭 Portfolio Overview

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Market Overview: A Pause Before the Push?

The S&P 500 eked out a 0.3% gain, reaching record territory midweek before reversing on Friday. The Dow and NASDAQ dipped slightly, marking the third consecutive week of divergence among the major benchmarks. Strength in Communication Services and Energy sectors helped offset declines in Technology and Healthcare. Small caps continued to underperform, reflecting tighter liquidity conditions and increased selectivity among investors.

International markets fared better, with the MSCI EAFE up 1.6% and Emerging Markets adding 1.8%—notably led by an 8.0% surge in Korea. Currency strength in the Australian dollar, Swiss franc, and Japanese yen signaled improved global risk appetite and capital flows into developed markets.

The broader theme this week was “pause and reassess”—a perfect encapsulation of the Saturnian influence now prominent as Saturn inches toward the final degrees of Pisces, tightening its grip on forward motion. The opposition between the Leo Moon and the Aquarius Sun on Friday marked a Full Moon, illuminating tension between individualism and group-think, and this dichotomy played out vividly in market behavior.

Policy & Leadership: The Warsh Shock

The unexpected nomination of Kevin Warsh to succeed Jerome Powell as Fed Chair introduced a burst of volatility. Warsh, previously critical of quantitative easing and often perceived as more hawkish than his predecessor, introduces a new layer of uncertainty. Although the Fed left rates unchanged, reinforcing its recent pivot toward policy stability, the Warsh announcement late in the week acted as a destabilizing catalyst—reflected sharply in commodities and Treasurys.

Gold and silver, which had been on a tear, reversed dramatically. Gold plummeted from a record $5,586 per ounce to close the week below $4,900—a near 12% drop in 24 hours. Silver fared worse, falling over 30% from its peak. These moves mirrored classic Saturn-Pluto themes: the tightening of monetary power (Saturn in Pisces) confronting speculative excess (Pluto in Aquarius).

Sector and Style Breakdown: Growth Falters as Energy Surges

Energy (+3.9%) and Consumer Staples (+0.8%) were key sector gainers. Energy’s YTD advance now stands at 14.4%, supported by a 6.9% weekly jump in crude prices to $66/barrel. Materials and Tech lagged, the latter suffering from stretched valuations and soft guidance in earnings reports.

From a style perspective, Small-Cap Growth continued to suffer, declining 3.1% on the week. Year-to-date trends show a clear rotation toward value in mid and small caps—highlighting the market’s preference for stable earnings and cash flows as Saturn nears its ingress into Aries in late Q1.

Fixed Income: Stable Yields, Shaky Credit

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When I talk about low volatility and high consistency now, I’m not speaking from textbooks or someone else’s wisdom. I’m speaking from years of realizing that the strongest portfolios feel less like roller coasters and more like long walks—quiet, intentional, and grounded. They rise slowly, almost imperceptibly at times, but they rise with a kind of trustworthiness that the heart can settle into.

My son asked me once why I care so much about keeping volatility low, as if avoiding turbulence somehow meant sacrificing ambition. I had to smile, because I remember feeling that way too. Back then, volatility felt like a tax I was willing to pay for the chance at something spectacular. Now, at fifty-one, I understand that spectacular moments are fleeting, but stability is a companion that carries you through the years.

A low-volatility portfolio begins with the same principles I use in the Lunar Landing Portfolio: find the companies that rise more often than they fall, that maintain their strength even when the world seems uncertain, that recover from drawdowns with a kind of measured calm. These are rarely the companies lighting up headlines. They’re the ones quietly shaping the economy—large contributors to the S&P 500, businesses whose performance pulls the market forward rather than following behind it.

When I look at a stock, I pay as much attention to its drawdown profile as I do its return. A company that rockets upward but plunges back down just as quickly asks too much of an investor’s spirit. But one that climbs like a tide—slow, steady, natural—can hold a place in a portfolio for years without demanding emotional sacrifice.

Consistency, I’ve learned, is not the absence of movement. It is movement with purpose.

Building a portfolio around that idea means choosing companies with historical resilience, stable earnings, reasonable volatility, and a pattern of long-term upward trends. It means accepting that I would rather earn slightly less in a calm, predictable climb than chase a higher return wrapped in chaos. It means seeing investing not as a race, but as an unfolding—a process that stretches across decades, not days.

So how does someone begin?
By choosing fewer companies, but choosing them deeply.
By studying five-year returns and rolling-year windows.
By respecting maximum drawdown as a teacher, not a warning.
By balancing growth with the gentle ballast of ETFs and dividends.

A low-volatility, high-consistency portfolio becomes something like a sanctuary—a place that doesn’t shake every time the market inhales. Over time, the compounding that seems slow at first reveals itself as profoundly powerful. Slow is not weak. Slow, carried faithfully through years, becomes unstoppable.

When I explained this to my son, I told him the truth I wish I had known earlier: the point of investing isn’t excitement. It’s endurance. It’s staying long enough for time to do its work. And the portfolios that endure are the ones built on steadiness, repetition, patience.

In the end, consistency is a kind of love—quiet, dependable, always moving, even when you don’t notice it. And a portfolio built on that kind of consistency has a way of carrying you gently into the future, one measured step at a time.

Portfolio Overview

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