It doesn’t appear that anyone uses a birth chart to determine whether to go long on gold in the office buildings grouped around Mayfair and St. James’s. They appear to be secretive, costly, and staffed by PhD holders from universities that don’t educate you how to read planetary transits. Through the windows, the Bloomberg terminals blaze. The experts arrive early and depart late. The entire process conveys the unique assurance of organizations that feel they are working at the cutting edge of quantitative rigor. And yet. Someone is wondering what Jupiter is doing this quarter somewhere in this ecosystem, maybe in a meeting room a few storeys above a Mayfair street, maybe over the phone with a consultant whose LinkedIn profile is really hard to classify.
To be clear, this is not a widely accepted development. Astrologers are not taking the place of quantitative analysts in hedge funds as a whole. Major London-based funds’ compliance teams are not setting up meetings with practitioners who use financial charts to monitor Mars. However, the phenomenon is real enough to be documented, real enough that full-time, on-site astrologer positions at financial firms have occasionally been listed in LinkedIn job postings, and real enough that the Astrologers Fund Inc., an actual investment vehicle that uses planetary positions as part of its portfolio management methodology, has been around long enough to be mentioned in financial media on occasion without being quickly written off as satire.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Industry | Hedge funds and alternative investment firms |
| Location Focus | London, UK (global niche trend) |
| Practice Type | Financial astrology and unconventional alternative data methods |
| Known Practitioner | The Astrologers Fund Inc. (uses planetary positions alongside market data) |
| Planets Used | Jupiter, Mars (correlated with commodity trends including gold) |
| Hiring Evidence | LinkedIn job postings for full-time on-site “Astrologer” roles at financial firms |
| Parallel Hiring Trend | Meteorologists — 23% hiring increase in 2024 for climate-commodity analysis |
| Other Expert Hires | Doctors, scientists for pharmaceutical stock analysis |
| Billionaire Practice | “Woo woo” methods including manifesting and positive thinking openly discussed |
| Industry Context | Alternative data search intensifying as traditional data commoditizes |
| Market Trigger | Trend emerges during turbulent periods where standard economic models failed |
| Industry Consensus | Highly unconventional peripheral tactic; not mainstream practice |
For the greater part of a decade, the hedge fund sector has been changing due to the alternative data arms race. Earnings reports, economic indicators, price-to-earnings ratios, and macroeconomic forecasts are examples of traditional data that has become so accessible and extensively examined that no one really benefits from it. Trading on Bloomberg data yields average returns at best if all funds have access to the same data at the same time.
Businesses are driven to use data sources that their rivals aren’t using in an effort to get an advantage, and these sources become increasingly unconventional the farther they are from the financial mainstream. Prior to the release of earnings, parking lot satellite imagery is used to estimate store traffic. The tone of management during earnings calls is analyzed using natural language processing. Agricultural commodity locations are mapped onto atmospheric river data. Financial astrology is at the further end of this scale.
Perhaps the most instructive similarity is the hiring of meteorologists. In 2024, hedge funds hired 23% more people with weather expertise because to the really beneficial relationship between commodities prices and climatic patterns. Weather has a quantitative and predictable impact on energy demand, agricultural harvests, shipping routes, and infrastructural stress. Having meteorologists on staff provides financial information models that are difficult for rivals to match with only financial data. The reasoning is quite logical.
Additionally, it is conceptually similar to financial astrology, which uses unconventional predictive modeling to make the same assertions regarding edge; the only difference is whether the underlying process is planetary alignment or meteorology.
The billionaire “woo woo” fad gives the narrative a new angle. A number of well-known hedge fund managers have started talking openly about their use of techniques like purposeful positive thinking, manifesting, and what some refer to as “working through limiting beliefs about wealth and success” in interviews and conferences.
These are people in charge of billions of dollars discussing openly mindset approaches that their quant teams would likely find difficult to emulate, not fringe practitioners in a back office. Since both require employing non-traditional frameworks to affect decision-making under settings of deep ambiguity, the distinction between this type of psychological activity and financial astrology is relevant in theory but somewhat hazy in how it is handled.
The timing of when these behaviors become most apparent is instructive. When standard economic modeling has clearly failed, such as when central bank forecasts missed significantly, when market correlations broke down in unexpected ways, or when models trained on historical data encountered conditions they hadn’t been trained on, the documented hiring trends and the most prominent discussions of unconventional approaches tend to cluster around those times.
The hunt for alternatives becomes less discriminating when the quantitative approaches that were used to justify massive costs and strong projections prove to be less accurate than anticipated. Financial astrology might be given more attention because everything else has been flawed lately.
When using astrological frameworks for financial research, practitioners usually do not contend that market fluctuations are directly caused by the planets. The more complex version of the argument holds that astrological calendars, which have been used for thousands of years to track cyclical patterns, may capture something genuine about the rhythms of collective human behavior in ways that purely data-driven analysis misses, and that financial markets are human systems driven by human psychology operating on cycles. Markets are unaffected by Jupiter’s position. However, if enough traders behave in accordance with their beliefs, the belief itself generates price consequences. It’s another matter entirely whether that loop warrants hiring a full-time astrologer.
A clearer picture is presented by the physicians and scientists who participate in hedge fund expert networks. Pharmaceutical stocks fluctuate significantly in response to regulatory approvals, clinical trial results, and biomarker data that requires medical knowledge to properly evaluate. In essence, a fund without scientific staff is trading pharmaceutical stocks based on analyst comments and press releases authored by individuals with similar lack of scientific expertise.
An information advantage that is simple to explain in a risk committee meeting is provided by bringing in researchers who can assess trial design, read FDA briefing documents, and comprehend mechanism-of-action facts. It is more difficult to explain the astrologer. However, the fundamental motivation is the same: identify a source of information that your rivals lack.
From the outside, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the hedge fund industry’s reputation for brutal rationalism has always been overstated. These are human-staffed establishments that must make decisions in the face of uncertainty and compete for the results that their clients and fees expect. When under constant pressure to perform better, people frequently seek for tools that more relaxed surroundings wouldn’t warrant. An extreme example of that reaching is the astrologer in a Mayfair meeting room, but it’s the same instinct that employed the doctor, the meteorologist, and the alternative data specialist who monitors sentiment on social media in 47 languages.
Whether any of this truly results in higher returns is still up for debate. In all honesty, the evidence is scant, the time periods are brief, and survivorship bias makes it challenging to determine which unconventional activities were coincidentally present when good fortune struck and which contributed to success. Because markets are so complicated, practically any prediction framework may seem to work for a while. Until the next unsuccessful call, the astrologer who correctly predicted a gold rise in Q2 is likely to retain their consulting job.
There’s a sense that astrology has nothing to do with this truly fascinating tale. It concerns what happens to professional judgment when commoditized data, extreme financial pressure, and the true unpredictability of complex systems come together. When conventional models don’t work, as they do, meteorologists aren’t the only ones looking for alternatives. It continues. If you look far enough, you’ll come across someone inquiring about Jupiter.