Astro-Analysis Program

AstroAnalyst Logo

ASTROLABE: The AstroAnalyst ® by Bill Meridian and Robert Hand

Technical Analysis + Market Timing = A New Dimension in Market Timing

The AstroAnalyst is the first software to add astronomical indicators to existing technical analysis tools. This powerful IBM-compatible program supplies extra information for both short-term and longer-range trading.

Price Charts--with Planets!

Have you ever wondered why your favorite technical indicators don't always work? The AstroAnalyst can provide valuable clues.

It draws top-quality price charts, with trendlines, moving averages, filters, envelopes and stochastics--also Gann and Fibonacci lines. And, when a trend change or breakout puzzles you, it shows you instantly what was happening in the sky.

Soon you'll get to know the astronomical conditions under which your technical indicators may work in unexpected ways.

Horoscope Wheels--with Prices!

With the AstroAnalyst's horoscope- wheel view, you can watch the prices change as the planets move. You can see exact planetary positions for any moment during the day, viewed either from your own locality or the Exchange on which you are trading. This is great for seeing how small changes in planetary positions correlate with short-term price fluctuations.

It's also good for studying historical data. At a keystroke, you can move the planets forward by regular time increments (minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc.), and see how the prices change. The diagram form gives you a spatial, gut-level sense of what's going on.

Composite Cycle Graphs

Is there an 88-day heliocentric Mercury rhythm in gold? A Venus cycle in copper prices? The AstroAnalyst gives you an easy way to find out.

It can test a huge variety of astronomical events: eclipses; Moon phases; planetary returns, aspects and parallels; zero latitude and declination passes; perigee, apogee, perihelion and aphelion passes; planetary stations, maximum elongations, and more.

It can list each occurrence of these events over any time period. It can also mark them on the price graphs to give you a quick visual impression of how these events affect prices.

For more rigorous study, there are Composite Cycle Graphs. These filter out other factors and show, in graph form, how any particular series of prices is affected by any cycle. You can immediately tell from the amplitude of the graph whether the cycle is strong enough to deserve further investigation.

If the cycle looks promising, the prog-ram can convert it to a mathematical formula. This enables you to project composite price cycles into the future.

Also you can combine many astronomical cycles at once to create a complex mathematical model of price behavior. Adding new cycles, you can come closer and closer to simulating actual prices. At each stage, you can graph your cyclical model alongside actual prices to see how well it fits reality. You can also test the model's usefulness by paper-trading on the buy and sell signals it suggests.

A Free Database

The AstroAnalyst comes with a 200-year database of stock averages, with daily DJIA figures from 1897 on. This long run of data enables you to test even the slow cycles of the outer planets. You can also import and update any kind of price data from standard sources like CompuTrac, MetaStock and CSI.

A Historic Breakthrough

Finally, you can test virtually any ideas you may have about astro cycles and the market--quickly, easily, and with little or no mathematical training!

The Trader's Most Complete Tool for Astroeconomic Research . . .

. . . Is Also a Full-featured charting program!

Complete! Includes 3,000 years of positions for the Sun, Moon and 8 planets; plus the minor planets Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta and Chiron from 1730 to 2050. Not only can you do planetary forecasts of prices today, you can also delve into centuries-long social, economic and climatic cycles.

Ultra-accurate! Agrees with government sources within (at worst!) 2 seconds of arc in all periods tested. This gives you very precise times for astronomical events.

Your choice of coordinate systems in all displays: geo, helio, right ascensional, tropical or sidereal (Fagan-Bradley or Lahiri) frameworks; latitudes and declinations included.

Complete position listings include geocentric and heliocentric planetary nodes, aphelia and perihelia, apogees and perigees, and the position of the solar-system barycenter.

Includes all types of cyclical astronomical event: eclipses; Moon phases; any angular relationship between two bodies (or even between a body and the midpoint of two others); parallels in latitude or declination; zero latitude or declination passages; stations in longitude, right ascension, latitude or declination; closest and farthest passes to the Sun or Earth; Venus and Mercury maximum elongations; stations of the true lunar node and of the solar-system barycenter.

Immensely powerful, yet requires little prior knowledge of astrology or astronomy. All astro terms and concepts are explained in the manual.

Price charts are in full, high-resolution color on EGA or VGA video displays; and print out in top-resolution black-and-white on dot-matrix or laser printers.

Charts can cover any period from several days to 200+ years; are in line or bar form with arithmetic or logarithmic scales and optional volume bars.

Pull-down menus give you close-ups of the price graph, exact numerical high-low-open-close and volume figures, days between dates, and planetary positions or aspects.

A choice selection of technical overlays includes trendlines; moving averages; oscillators; stochastics; envelopes; and Fibonacci and Gann lines.

Accepts price data from leading vendors: CompuTrac, CSI, Metastock, ASCII, etc.: both historical data on disk and current data from on-line services. Has fields for daily, weekly, monthly or yearly high, low, open and close prices, plus volume and open interest. Futures data can be in single-contract, cash or perpetual-contract form.

Price data is easy to input, update and edit, and you can file it as you please in any directory on your hard disk.

Comes with 200 years of data. For index trading and long-term cycle study, the AstroAnalyst has daily DJIA high-low-close prices from 1897, and Foundation for the Study of Cycles reconstructed monthly prices from 1789.

Use for all kinds of trading:

Futures, options, index trading, T-bonds, stocks and corporate bonds, currency, interest rate projections, government econ-omic figures, etc.--anything you can get historical data for! Use for trading several times a day to several times a year.

Runs on PC-compatible computers:

Any fully PC-compatible computer (XT, '286, '386, '486 or PS2) with a hard disk, 640K RAM, DOS 3.0 or higher, 8087-type math co-processor chip, and graphics card (EGA or VGA for screens in color; Hercules or CGA for monochrome). Epson- and IBM-compatible dot-matrix printer or Hewlett Packard LaserJet II or above, DeskJet or compatibles. Program requires 5Mb on disk with current 300 years of planetary data (or 7Mb with 3,000 years), and at least 10Mb additional for generating data files.

What you'll receive:

Depending on your disk size, you get from 4 to 13 program disks; 200 years of DJIA stock averages; a 350-page manual; and free phone assistance--all for $1250.

For $250 extra, you also get the powerful Planetary Trend Lines/Aspect Lines add-on. This option for the AstroAnalyst contains two additional techniques that may be part of the lost astrological secrets of W.D. Gann. With Planetary Trend Lines to provide the price levels and Planetary Aspect Lines to confirm the timing, we have a simple-to -use but very powerful tool. You can use these techniques with other indicators provided by the AstroAnalyst, but they are so powerful in themselves you can use them singly or together as the nucleus for an effective and profitable trading system. Besides the disk, you will also get a heavily illustrated 30-page booklet written by Robert Hand which discusses using the Planetary Trend Lines/Aspect Lines with stock prices and commodities involving both long- and short-term examples.

Common Questions About the AstroAnalyst

Why should I use astro trading signals?: While technical indicators are good at predicting price levels, astro indicators seem especially good at timing price moves. No one knows why planets affect the markets, but many past researchers, including James Mars Langham, Charles Clifford Matlock and L. Edward Johndro, have observed that they do. Even the line slopes of the legendary W.D. Gann may be approximations of planetary motion. Today, many traders quietly use eclipses and planetary aspects, because they find that these astro indicators work. Planets may work because the market is basically governed by swings in mass psychology. Just as the Moon is known to influence tides and emotions, the other solar-system bodies may also do this in some subtle way. Or the planets may simply be like clock hands timing various cycles. The important thing is: Are astro indicators useful for increasing profits? The AstroAnalyst doesn't assume astro indicators work--it lets you find this out for yourself.
What, exactly, does the AstroAnalyst do?: The AstroAnalyst was designed by a market professional specifically for financial work. It combines a) price charting and technical overlays with b) the most complete and accurate astronomical information available to traders. With this incredibly powerful tool, you can test virtually any kind of correlation between astronomical events and market movements. The AstroAnalyst enables you to
What doesn't it do?: While the AstroAnalyst can calculate the horoscope of any corporation, security or exchange (or even the horoscope of you, the investor), this is not the way it predicts prices. Instead, the AstroAnalyst works with the actual prices of a stock or commodity, and shows you what the planets were doing when the prices rose or fell. You deduce what will happen in the future not from what's supposed to happen according to astrological tradition, but from what actually happened in the past.
Must I know astrology to use it?: All you need to know is the symbols for the planets and signs (which you can pick up in a few minutes), and some basic concepts about the planets which are explained in the program manual. You don't need to know how to read a horoscope, or know the finer points of astrology.
What kind of trading can I use it for?: Just about any kind of trading you do! Commodities and futures of all sorts . . . T-bonds and T-bills . . . Options . . . Index options . . . Shares . . . anything you can get historical data for. The AstroAnalyst's profitability testing works with both long and short positions, and you can use the program whether you trade every day or every year.
Can I use it in intraday trading?: The AstroAnalyst does not accept tick data, because the huge gaps in tick data caused by non-trading hours would seriously skew any Composite Cycle Graph studies. The AstroAnalyst does, however, have some very useful intraday features. While your tick data is coming in on another machine, you can use the AstroAnalyst screen to display a continuously updating circular diagram showing where the planets are at the current moment. This shows you what planetary patterns correspond with significant market movements. When there's an interesting price change, hit the screen-dump keys on your AstroAnalyst computer to get a dated, timed record of the planets at that moment. You can study historical data the same way, studying printouts of where the planets were at the times of interesting price movements. Other features in the AstroAnalyst will give you the astro trend background behind the day's fluctuations. Planetary patterns can alert you to days of more-than-usual volatility, and the possibility of a major price reversal.
What kind of data does it analyze?: Any price or other data in CSI, CompuTrac, Metastock, Coast Investment Software, or ASCII format ("askey"--the standard format for computer exchange). (Most of the leading data formats are OK. If you're uncertain about the data you use, the data lines should contain only numbers, with the month, day, year and price or prices for a given date being all on one line. Alphabetic characters, if any, are permissible only in header lines.) You can load historical data from disks, and update it either manually from printed sources or by downloading over the phone lines. The AstroAnalyst works with daily, weekly, monthly and yearly data. It inserts spaces for nontrading days, making the data usable with astronomical cycles. It contains fields for high, low, open and close prices; also for volume and open interest. For futures, it will work over the short term with a single contract, and over longer periods with cash or perpetual contract data. You can also use the Astro-Analyst to analyze any other data that is regularly reported in time, like government economic figures, population, etc. The AstroAnalyst also includes a free, built-in database of DJIA-type stock averages.
Why does the AstroAnalyst include DJIA data?: Because the Dow is so long-running. The Dow itself goes back to 1897, and the Foundation for the Study of Cycles and others have reconstructed monthly U.S. stock averages back to 1789. This gives you a handy 200-year database for studying the longer planetary cycles. Since the Dow parallels averages like the S&P 500, you can also use it in index trading.
How much price charting and technical analysis does it do?: To keep you from having to switch to another charting program, the AstroAnalyst has an excellent range of price-charting and technical-analysis features. These have been selected for their usefulness with planetary cycles. The AstroAnalyst does standard line or bar charts, showing prices arithmetically or logarithmically, and you can have optional volume bars at the bottom. The charts can cover any period from a few days to over 200 years. To get an exact price for any point in the chart, you can get a closeup graph or a window with the exact high, low, close, volume and open-interest numbers in it. There's also an optional window showing days between dates. Unlike other charting programs, the AstroAnalyst also gives you windows with planetary positions or aspects for any date on the graph. As technical overlays, you can have trendlines (as many as you want, drawn between high, low, or closing prices) . . . moving averages (centered, displaced, or trailing; any length, and up to three at a time) . . . oscillators, stochastics, rate-of-change indicators and relative strength indexes. There are also Gann lines, and Fibonacci dates and retracements.
Why do you include technical overlays?: Because prices depend on the condition of the market as well as planetary timers. Though astro indicators may work by themselves, they work even better with proven technical tools.
What kind of astronomical data is included in the AstroAnalyst?: Just about everything you can think of--and then some! Complete, 3,000-year data for the Sun, Moon and 8 planets--plus several centuries of the major asteroids Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, and the newly discovered Chiron. There's even cycle information for 10 hypothetical planets that various people have experimented with. You can look at the planets from three points of view: geocentric (as viewed from the Earth), heliocentric (as viewed from the Sun) or in right ascension (in relation to the Earth's equator). Not just in their orbital position, but also in terms of latitude and declination. You can also see where they are in relation to any other planet or point: in standard astrological aspects or in any other angular relationship, including midpoints. You can even study such exotic things as both kinds of lunar node (mean and true nodes), geocentric and heliocentric nodes of the planets, planetary aphelia and perihelia (far and near points from the Sun), apogees and perigees (far and near points from the Earth), and planetary stations (points where planets appear to change direction) in longitude, latitude, declination or right ascension. Also the "retrograde Sun"--those rare times (like the fall of 1989) when the Sun travels backward in the zodiac in relation to the barycenter or center of mass of the solar system. Things like the barycenter, planetary apogees, and stations of the true lunar node are virtually unavailable from any other source. This planetary data is ultra-accurate, which makes for accurate timing of cycles. Thorough checking shows that AstroAnalyst planetary positions agree with the best astronomical sources within one (or, at worst, two) seconds of arc.
Why 3,000 years of planetary information?: So you can study things like wheat prices back into the Middle Ages, or satisfy your curiosity about social trends and long-term planetary cycles, or find when in history some present-day planetary grouping last occurred.
Who are the authors?: Bill Meridian has done technical analysis since the mid-1960s and started using astro indicators in 1972. He designed the AstroAnalyst to do in minutes the sort of astro-technical studies that once took weeks to do by hand and hours to do with a spreadsheet program. Meridian has an M.B.A. in finance, is a registered broker, and is a member of the Market Technicians Association. He now works in the Mideast, taking time off to lecture widely and write many articles on astro-trading and other subjects.