When I was 14 years old visited the home of my parent's neighbour (her name is Esperanza), immediately my eyes couldn't stop to look around all mystical objects she had everywhere, from all those magical things, she took a metal bowl (indian) and start to move a wooden stick around it, a beautiful harmonious sound was produced, I was astonished. She explained that everything in the cosmos was vibrating, including our physical body, that all those vibrations are combining and interacting all the time, that all of us has a vibrational blueprint that is impregnated at our birth, we could find our energy purpose by looking at the position of the planets at the moment of our first breathing (the birth and origin). I was curious to know what stars could say about my life so very gently, she invited me to enter a room where she had a computer with an astrological software "Solar Fire" and dedicated some time to calculate my astrological natal chart and do a quick interpretation. I feel the match, whatever was contained in that wheel filled wih symbols I couldn't understand described very accurately my essential forces, my personality, interests, desires, familiar relationships and much more. From that moment an immense need of knowledge burned in me, my search to try to understand the manifestation of the cosmic energy started.
My family don't believed in astrology, my mom and dad call it a superstitious or pseudo-science used by charlatans, as you imagine at my parents house you wouldn't expect to find an astrology book, right? Not sure why and who bring it to home but there was only one, very basic, just explained the planets and zodiacal signs but was enough for me to start. I was firm in my belief that astrology should have a solid foundations, that some deep knowledge was waiting for me to be discovered.
I don't remember who advised me to visit the second-hand book stores at the Donceles Street, Mexico City, that person suggested that in this place I can find books for any ancient knowledge, including aztec and maya civilizations. I was 16 years old and ready to dedicate hundreds of hours reviewing at every bookshelf in order to discover all the secrets that astrology was holding for me. Literally, I went store by store from the beginning to the end, reviewed every space across all Donceles street. Every weekend I found one or two books relevant for my research but one day the miracle occurred, at "Libreria Nely", Donceles #105, the saleswoman, tired of taking back and forth a bunch of astrology books from the warehouse, invited me to get in into some dark antique rooms, she told me: nobody can access here, however, you are so curious and good client so will help in your search, in all those bookshelves there are thousands of books about esoteric topics, including astrology, take your time and review whatever you like, feel at home. I was very excited, was impressed, in some hours I found that there was batch of books, presumably from the same family that decided to sell all their astrology catalog to this book store, there was around two hundred, unfortunately I don't have enough money to purchase all the catalog at once so needed to go step by step. During 3 years, every weekend I visited this store and purchased one or two books. I got around 60 from this collection which is my most precious treasure that is kept at my parents home at Mexico City.
I acquired many books to contrast different authors knowledge, access to different interpretation methods and prognostic approaches: primary and secondary progressions, solar and lunar return, solar arc, transits, primary directions and symbolic directions. Therefore, I was able to research those techniques in order to find what works well and understand the cosmic purpose of my family members (parents, sisters, cousins and so forth) energy. The problem was that doing all this studies manually was time-consuming (difficult to interpret) and hard to validate, people don't tend to register all the daily events so comparing the dates of astro events with life events to confirm the correlations was impossible, the volunteers for the study don't collaborated enough, one day I concluded that cannot continue move on through this study, that the only possibility was to stick the research to my own natal chart. However, was concerned that judging myself could suffer from personal bias, frustrated of those blockers, abandoned the research.
My other passion was sit in front of computer during prolonged sessions, learning how to instruct a machine to do computations for me and presenting content at web pages, I started developing basic pages with Geocities. One day tried to figured out how to do massive calculation of all my natal chart progression and directions for entire lifetime so took a look at some planets orbits calculation but noted that was very complex, at that moment I was not able to achieve my goal but learned how to create web pages and started an esoteric online community in the times of IRC chat, I spent many nights discussing tarot, astral projection, astrology, dowsing among other great topics and met wise people. Some years later, when got married and moved to Madrid, Spain this talent for computers became my main profession, passion and way of living. With some patience some years later I found the Swiss Ephemeris and astrological open source software that studied in detail to figure out how to do the massive computations that I needed.
It was 2008, Madrid, Spain, perhaps just a coincidence but the building where I was working as a professional Drupal Software Developer was located at Moon Square (Plaza de la Luna), the project was in fire because was launched into production and suffered from architectural problems and serious performance issues, where many people saw big problems I saw a great opportunity to learn how to deal with performance optimization. Decided to work very hard to help my technical boss to stabilize the web application and after few months gained him trust. In 2009, he relieved some stress and become more friendly and supportive, he started to talk about him passions and for first time in my life I heard about "forex trading". I don't have any glue on what all that fancy terms he was using was about so asked him to explain me more about trading, one day, he opened Trade Station software at him computer opened the EURUSD symbol chart and explained about technical indicators, volatility, trend, oscillators, technical and fundamental analysis and so forth. It was too much information but was very excited to learn more, few days later, gently, that wise man of name Hervé, lent me some algo trading books and another journey started.
Same year, 2009, was curious to know about what's all that stuff that tech people was referring as artificial intelligence and machine learning. I was curious (as always) to know if was realistic to say that one day the computers can outperform humans in many tasks, searched some books and found a title "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran, in this book he did a great work introducing to statistical concepts and demonstrated multiples machine learning algorithms for optimization, clustering, classification, genetic programming and quick introduction to neural networks. After completed this reading, I envision the possibility to use pattern recognition to forecast markets prices but was not sure how to start. The initial idea was to look at technical indicators to recognize some patterns that in the past produce certain outcomes with greater probability than a random choice. This took me some years to read enough about all the machine learning algorithms and TA indicators that I could use to build this forecasting models, my machine learning knowledge was limited and besides this research needed to continue full time with my software developer day job.
In 2010, Hervé mentioned that if I wanted to be serious algo trading developer, it was mandatory to read "Trading Systems and Methods" by Perry J. Kaufman, from him perspective this was the bible for algo-traders and all the most advanced techniques was covered here. Unfortunately the book was expensive >100 USD and very long 1200 pages, I decided to look in other books but noted that many TA indicators was not well explained and back-tested, finally on April 2013, purchased that book and dedicated all my spare time to study. In some days arrived to chapter 14 “Behavioral Techniques”, at the Cycles Analysis chapter he emphasised the possible importance of planetary cycles: The possibility cannot be eliminated that planetary motion may account for, besides seasonality, the effects of mass behaviour, which can produce a consistent cycle that repeats with a fixed period. — Perry J. Kaufman — Trading Systems and Methods
As you can imagine, this was the "Ahá moment", what Steve Jobs describe as the moment that connect all the dots of knowledge you have accumulating during many years of your life.
I remember that prior to read Trading System and Methods was doing some basic exploratory analysis of planet aspects to determine if there is a correlation with markets prices fluctuations, I was not totally sure, but after completing the reading of that book, firmly believed that if astrology works there would be a machine learning model able to detect the relevant planet cycles patterns and forecast the market trend with more than 60 percent accuracy. I felt very confident, that will find a response soon, perhaps in a couple of months, finally would be able to validate if all the astro energy coincidences that I saw in my natal chart when I was 14 could be validated with statistical metrics an applied to other areas besides psychological astrology, such as financial markets, where humanity have accumulated enough historical data for conducting proper scientific research.
As usual, I under-estimated the effort, it resulted to require more than couple months research to find some solid metrics that could indicate if financial astrology has real predictive power. The conclusion is: the greatest ancient minds couldn't be wrong, Claudius Ptolemy, Al-Biruni, Jean Baptiste Morin, William Lilly, Alan Leo, Gerolamo Cardano, Demetrio Santos, W. D. Gann, Michael Gauquelin, Charles Carter, Raphael, Sepharial, among other great minds. Financial Astrology works because it models the mechanics of cosmic energy and nobody can escape to those influences, modeling this energy through machine learning techniques outperform any human (astrologer) as in any other fields, the ML experiments formulated in this repository proof that mundane astrology predictive techniques works.
During all the years I have been researching this ancient knowledge the biggest blocker was all the skeptical scientists that criticize the validity of astrology and catalog it as "pseudo-science". The hard work to proof this vision is wrong is here, I did all the hard work and open source this repository so any sceptical, curious or researcher colleagues can go further and cover all the search space that was not able to reach due to my limitations with time and computing resources. Don't believe my conclusions? Checkout the code, train some models across different markets and validate forecasts against future data, you will reach in average 56 to 60 percent accuracy predicting daily price trend (buy / sell).
- To my parents that always encouraged me to learn, they provided all the resources I need (computer, books, courses) and promoted my curiosity. Even when they don't encouraged my astrology studies, I'm a software developer because they inspired my growth in this passion.
- To Esperanza that introduced me to astrology and guided in my first steps.
- To Hervé that patiently explained the fancy concepts of trading and technical analysis and introduced me to trading.
- To Tole (founder of Zignaly) that hired me to work at him startup and helped me to learn all I know about crypto-currencies trading.
- To the book store saleswoman that helped me to discover the great astrology catalogue that was waiting for me at Donceles, Mexico City.
- Finally, to the Financial Astrology Research community that keeps motivating and encouraging to keep researching, improving the models and sharing all the astrological knowledge that have accumulated through this long journey.
If you found this project inspiring and willing to get involved in the research, please avoid the hard way, the solo effort is very difficult to persists and progress is made slow. Join efforts with the great research team we built at Financial Astrology Research Group at Telegram: https://t.me/financial_astrology_stats