I sat down with a century of stock market data and tested it against the moon.
Not a handful of favorite examples pulled from memory because they happened to work out. All of it. Every quarter lunation, New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, Last Quarter, from August 1926 to August 2026, matched against the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the corresponding trading day. That’s 4,945 separate observations, each one tagged with the moon’s sign and phase at the moment it turned, run against a market that lived through the Depression, two world wars, stagflation, the dot-com crash, 2008, and whatever we end up calling the last few years.
I wanted to know one thing. Does the moon’s position actually line up with which way the market moves next, or is that just something we tell ourselves because we like a good story.
Here’s what I can tell you without giving away the report. There is a real, measurable, statistically defensible gap between the best-performing lunar sign and the worst, and it isn’t a small one. At the most extreme combination of sign and phase, the spread between the strongest reading and the weakest is over twenty-two percentage points of up frequency vs down. That’s not noise. That’s not me squinting at a chart until I see what I want to see. That’s a century of daily closes, run through the kind of statistical scrutiny a peer-reviewed journal would insist on, including the correction that punishes you for going looking for patterns in the first place.
And here’s the part that surprised me most, and the part I’m not ready to give away yet. The two signs that anchor the top and bottom of that range line up with a rhythm the market runs on every year. Most traders feel it without ever putting a name to it. What this research does is show, in the data, roughly where the moon sits when that mood turns.
I built this the way I would want to see it built if I were the skeptic in the room. Full methodology. Every correction I could throw at it. Every honest limitation stated in plain language. It is a research monograph with the receipts included, not a horoscope.
The full report, A Hundred Years of Moons and Markets, is out now. Paid subscribers to Market Watching the Moon can read the summary below and use the coupon code to get the full download for free.
If you have ever wondered whether the moon actually shows up in the numbers, or whether that is wishful thinking, this is the report that answers it. A paid subscription will gain immediate access.
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If a subscription isn’t your thing, you will be able to buy the report on its own as a digital download. That link is below.
