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Pastimes : Astrological Influences: Financial and Global Trends -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: re3 who wrote (12)	8/3/1999 10:59:00 AM
From: pater tenebrarum	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 538

i don't subscribe to it and have no opinion therefore - all i know is he sounded pretty apocalyptic in the last issue. hb

To: re3 who wrote (12)	8/3/1999 12:33:00 PM
From: Richnorth	Respond to of 538

For info about Arch Crawford, pay a visit to marketweb.com. Hope this helps.

To: re3 who wrote (12)	8/3/1999 12:51:00 PM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 538

The following news, taken from the URL below, first appeared in 1997. It gives a good write-up of Arch Crawford as an effective financial astrologer. detroitnews.com Astrologers offer down-to-earth stock advice: Sell, sell, sell (Note: this was the advice given in 1997) Kathy Kristof Financial astrologers are warning Wall Street that the stock market's near relentless rise soon may be over. "I'm looking for a sharp rally up into the middle of February, but I'm advising people to start getting out around the 13th and be completely out of the market by the 19th," says Arch Crawford, editor of what may well be the nation's best known astrologically based market timing report, Crawford Perspectives. The market will rally again in March, but after the lunar eclipse on March 24, watch out, he says. "I expect a sharp drop." Market astrologer Henry Weingarten concurs but quibbles a bit on the timing. He expects the Dow Jones industrial average to land at 5,222 -- more than 1,500 points below today's levels -- after the solar eclipse in early March. "Eclipses signify dramatic changes," says Weingarten, author of Investing by the Stars and managing director of the private Astrologer's Fund. Meanwhile, Yvonne Morabito, author of Dollar Signs: An Astrological Guide to Personal Finance, expects extreme volatility in February -- particularly with technology and communication stocks -- but she's less negative about March. "I'm expecting less spectacular but steady growth," she says. Prognosticating the stock market based on the positions of the planets is offbeat, to be sure. But it appears to be Wall Street's latest trend, largely because it can sometimes prove profitable. "Every major Wall Street firm that you can name is receiving some astrology newsletter through someone -- a broker, salesperson or executive," Morabito says. "They may smirk at you on the trading floor, but every skeptic I've ever met was standing there 45 minutes later asking me to do their chart." Wall Street's subculture of financial astrologers produces few verifiable track records. However, Crawford, for one, stacks up nicely against other so-called "pure" market timers, with most of them relying on hard economic data. In the last eight years, Crawford's performance ranks sixth out of roughly 100 market-timing newsletters based on the number of times he has accurately called the market's direction, says Jim Schmidt, editor of the Greenwich-based Timer Digest. Crawford Perspectives' five- and three-year performance ranks among the top 10 of all the timers studied, Schmidt adds. "A few other timers ... have performed well consistently over long time periods," Schmidt says. "But it's a small group. It indicates that the model Crawford is using performs well in different cycles." That doesn't mean Crawford beats the market in terms of total returns. If you had bought and held an unmanaged basket of stocks that tracked the Wilshire 5000 index over the last eight years, you would have earned an average annual return of 15.9 percent. Crawford's buy and hold recommendations generated an estimated return of 14.4 percent over that period. However, Crawford's portfolio was significantly less volatile than the market as a whole, consequently he beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis. Why would planetary positions affect stock prices on Earth? Crawford thinks it may have something to do with market psychology. "I believe it has to do with general levels of comfort and fear among the population," he says. Certain cosmic events -- sun spots, planetary alignments and eclipses, for example -- can make people feel euphoric or depressed. As with any product that experiences price swings based on supply and demand, no matter the fundamental values, if people aren't in the mood to buy, the price of your product languishes, he says. Syndicated columnist Kathy Kristof appears regularly in The Detroit News Business section. Contact her via the Internet at kristof@news.latimes.com. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.