Below please find the forecasting chart published on 3/19/06, with the red lines (future projection) matching the actual price action (black line) quite well (see also archives).

Please note: this chart is not up-to-date, a new one with a different outlook was released this week!

Due to feedback from readers I'd like to add some complementary explanations:

* First, it is of paramount importance to know what a cycle or an approach can contribute and what's beyond its possibilities. Expecting an accuracy of just a few days for a cycle with a length of

76.6 years is overconfident, +/- 1 months is still not much (about 1/1000 of the cycle length). That's why you always need other methods for the precise timing (purpose of Amanita pivots)

* Second, many fans of the Bradley siderograph seemed to expect that the market would set the yearly high with the 5/20 top of the siderograph. That was obviously not the case, an article published in the subscriber area this week explained the reason and also offers some valuable hints how to best use the Bradley to time long-term reversals, as the rules are quite different than one would expect without the research conducted... (link for subscribers). Presumably, this article will be published in the free area some time in 2006-7 but if you want to get the edge right now please subscribe (a trial subscription is enough).

Nevertheless, one has to keep in mind that the Bradley is missing many major turns, so just relying on this one model is not enough. And neither is the siderograph the Holy Grail of market forecasting but merely one instrument among dozens to pay attention to.

Quite fascinating is that exactly at the same time when stocks were tumbling an out-of-control "mad" bear in the border region between Germany and Austria has received a lot of media coverage. I don't think this is just a coincidence because the bear is the symbol for a downtrend, and by the way the Austrian Traded Index (ATX) was one of the indices hit hardest (almost 20%).

For me this is a typical example of a synchronicity (Wikipedia):

Synchronicity is a word coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the "temporally coincident occurrences of non-causal events." Jung spoke of synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle" (i.e. a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by direct causality). Plainly put, it is the experience of having two (or more) things happen coincidentally in a manner that is meaningful to the person or persons experiencing them, where that meaning suggests an underlying pattern.

Similarly, bear market beginnings in the past were frequently accompanied by the outbreak of the foot and mouth disease (since the 80ies also BSE) that is killing the symbol for the bull market, the bull:

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The last outbreak in the 20th century in the USA "accidentally" happened in 1929, with the deepest bear market in history ensuing

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In 1966 the disease spread in Great Britain, the high of the Dow Jones 1966 was not significantly taken out for decades.

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In 1986/87 both Germany and Great Britain experienced a pandemic, 1987 is well known for the steepest crash in history

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And Taiwan was hit in 1997 which coincided with the Asian crisis in 1997 and the massive pullback in these markets.

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On 3/13/2000 the disease again broke out in Europe, on 3/24/2000 (the day of the all-time high of the S&P 500!) Japan the 2nd largest economy of the world was hit, too.

This is in full accordance with the astrological point of view since of the 12 signs Taurus the Bull (4/20-5/21) is clearly ruling the stock market. Both largest bourses in the world were founded under this sign, just separated by one day: the NYSE on 5/17/1792 and the Tokyo exchange on 5/16/1949.

The most known researchers in the field of synchronicities are Carl Gustav Jung

and the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli who even (unsuccessfully) tried to reconcile modern physics with the numerology of the Jewish cabbala. This project would most likely also embrace astrology, and I do expect a breakthrough in the next decades. It's interesting to note that the big guns in physics were also mystics as only their openness for the interconnectedness of the whole cosmos (that's behind synchronicities) opened their mind to their astonishing insights. Johannes Kepler was an excellent astrologer in the tradition of Hermes Trismegistos, and Isaac Newton wrote much more on alchemy than on physics (yet today he is only know for the latter).

Google as a New Sentiment Indicator (5/2006)

Google, the world's leading search engine, has started to offer charts displaying both the news reference volume and the number of internet searches on a specific topic. In this article I want to give a brief introduction how to use this numbers as a contrary indicator.

First I'd like to refer to an earlier article devoted to the critical analysis of the contrary approach, with the statement that actually many so-called contrary analysts are in fact contrary indicators themselves because they tackle this difficult topic with wrong methods. Still, the contrary approach is important because the sentiment measured is mostly outside the astrological universe, i.e. an external variable. An example easy to understand what I mean is the sex of person born on a certain date (and time & place), needless to say a horoscope erected for that time can always be both masculine and feminine, that's not contained in the horoscope.

The basic assumption of the contrary approach is that the mass is usually wrong, at least at the beginning and at the end of a trend but not in the middle. Extra-ordinary large interest by the media is often a sign of exaggerated sentiment and thus a warning of trend reversal. Google searches for "crude oil", "eurostoxx" or "russell 2000", to name the examples discussed below, are on the average conducted by newbies with no other standard source to look at, that's why we can assume that the majority is less-informed and therefore, in principal, a contrary indicator. 3 examples:

(1)

Crude Oil: The trend has been up in the recent years, that's why extreme spikes are usually a signal for a (temporary) overheated sentiment and thus a top: a large number of searches was conducted in May 2004, August 2004, October 2004, March 2005, and especially August 2005 where the news reference volume exploded, too. In each case an intermediate-term top was in place soon thereafter, in August 2005 the longest correction in years commenced.

(2)

EuroStoxxHere we had outliers in March 2004, September 2004, February 2005, September 2005,

(3)

Russell 2000: This search term was very popular in June 2004, around the turn of the year 2004/5, mid- 2005, and now in April 2006 (4x), again reliably signaling an intermediate-term correction. Actually, "EuroStoxx" and "Russell 2000" together cover all 9 intermediate-term highs of the past 2.5 years (on the average every 3 months: 3/04, 6/04, 9-10/04, 12/04-1/05, 3/05, 8/05, 11/05, 1/06, 5/06).

November 2005, and January 2006 (6x), every time the S&P 500 index formed an intermediate-term top.

Critical evaluation: there are 3 major approaches in sentiment analysis, namely polls, monetary indicators and media analysis, the Google analysis contributes to the latter approach, media analyses, the latter so far offers the weakest and narrowest set of instruments (e.g. the well-known Barron's cover indicator). We also have now a statistical indicator at hand that enriches the mostly anecdotal and thus very subjective rules of thumb. Besides, one can well assume that this indicator is - in contrast to many others - indeed measuring the behavior of the dumb money. The major disadvantages are: the linking to one company, the lack of suitability of many search terms (e.g. "gold" and "silver" are often used in sports, too), the rather short history available and the lack of the raw data to analyze in depth.