Weekly Column: Game on! GameStop!

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A surge of trading volume in shares of GameStop and AMC Entertainment, as well as Bed Bath & Beyond and BlackBerry, has stunned Wall Street firms that were betting that those stocks would fall. The share prices had instead spiked this week as retail investors, spurred by the online Reddit forum WallStreetBets, piled into the stocks. The volatility continued Wednesday as platforms like Robinhood and Interactive Brokers limited trading on certain stocks. Robinhood, which has billed itself as a democratizing force in the market, in particular took criticism. – Paul Connor, “GameStop, AMC Trading Frenzy Roils Wall Street,” www.foxbusiness.com, January 28, 2021.

Game on! GameStop! Robinhood! Wall Street hedge funds get ripped off?

It’s a classic case Saturn square Uranus, with the volatile, unpredictable Uranus in Taurus (the stock market) storming the gates of the establishment’s (Saturn) Wall Street professional hedgers, causing unimaginable and exaggerated price movements (Jupiter is involved too) in heavily shorted stocks. And the gate-stormers were winning! Well, they were winning until the rules (Saturn) were suddenly changed (Uranus) and the newbies (Uranus) were restricted from trading in these companies. So much for the concept of “free markets.” Intervention (a Plutonian dynamic) took over as Venus (money) was also conjunct with Pluto (liquidation and intervention).

I can’t really be critical of Robinhood, can I? After all, that’s where the namesake of my surname comes from. The Merrymen (i.e., “Merriman”) were originally “Archers in the service of the King.” Now I spend my hours trying to zero in on hitting the bullseye of highs and lows in financial markets. Apparently, so are many of my fellow archers from incarnations long ago. I wish them well as they seek the crown jewels of professional hedgers (short-sellers), who are like the “king’s men,” very upset with the upstart merrymen trading on the Robinhood platform You know, like “stealing from the rich to feed the poor.” Those who control the wealth and make the rules of the game don’t like that.

But, alas, this was not really in the spirit of Robinhood and his merrymen of days long past. This was more like Robinhood and scaredy-cats imposing restrictions on the new breed of young traders who were upending the status quo of the hedge fund establishment. This current Robinhood ran from the king’s men just as the “Money Heist” was getting underway by the new breed of suddenly rich and daring young speculators. This was the Robinhood whose ads tout “investing made easy.” Suddenly, investing became risky and dangerous, but it was also the way to quick riches if you were able to act nimbly and fast enough. That is, before this version of Robinhood pulled the plug and stopped all those new traders from taking their profits and bidding the companies even higher. But all this was adding up to huge losses for all the king’s men (the short-selling hedgers who bet against a company’s success).

But back to the case of Jupiter and Saturn square Uranus: nothing goes as planned, and there will be plenty of surprises in store for everyone this year – especially those who set themselves up as kings or king’s men (self-imposed or appointed regulators) and act like dictators and authoritarians (the low side of Saturn, especially with Pluto in Capricorn). That’s what Uranus (revolt, breaking the rules and customs) does now to Saturn (the rules and authority) in 2021. And it’s only the end of January. 

Uranus’ volatility was in full view in global equity markets last week. It was a week where nothing went quite as expected. The assault on short-sellers by Robinhood traders freaked the markets out and led to Wednesday’s global stock market rout. When the new rules to restrict trading were imposed, the markets recovered smartly for half of a day (Thursday), but then the selloff resumed due to the sudden and unexpected, uncertainty that had just exploded. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example, was down over 600 points on Wednesday. During the day on Thursday it was up over 600 points. Then another sell-off started and on Friday it was down another 600+ points again. It was not a good end to the week for any stock market, let alone a week when a few started off by making new all-time or multi-year highs. It is beginning to look like January-February of last year. But that was caused by a pandemic. Some kind of group-think may cause this. Both the sign of Aquarius and its ruler Uranus are big on group-think and frenzies.

Both the NASDAQ and S&P had just made new all-time highs before Wednesday’s selloff began (but not the DJIA). As pointed out in last week’s column, “The danger of a change in investor psychology is very strong during this period, and hence traders will need to be very careful. This can be a very erratic and volatile market with large price swings in very short periods of time… The tension suggested for this week is further augmented by the Leo full moon on January 28, the same period when the Sun will conjoin Jupiter, and Venus will conjoin Pluto. With Jupiter being the planet of exaggeration, still in a hard aspect with Uranus, one can see why there might be very large price moves nearby.” In case you hadn’t noticed, there was a correlation between cycles in the cosmos and cycles in human activity last week, and it showed up in financial markets. 

Short-term geocosmics

Then, when something suddenly happens to start a buying wave, buyers find the supply of stocks scarce and have to bid them up. It always happens that the higher prices go, the more people want to buy. This causes a final grand rush and a rapid advance in the last stages of a Bull Market. History always repeats on Wall Street, and what has happened in the past will happen again in the future. W.D. Gann, legendary financial astrologer and trader, “45 Years in Wall Street,” Lambert Gann, Pomeroy, WA, 1976, first written in 1949.

As if the market climate wasn’t erratic and unstable enough, now comes Mercury retrograde, the “Trickster,” onto the scene, January 30-February 20 in the U.S. (add one day for Europe and Asia at the end). This is just another time band when support and resistance are apt to be unreliable, which is not the optimal situation for chartists or technical analysis.

Market flip-flops may reflect the political flip-flops of world leaders, too. It is not the ideal time to be position trading and it may not be the perfect time to have a trial for impeaching former President Donald Trump. Things aren’t likely to go as expected. With Mercury retrograde conjoining Jupiter for much of this period, we can anticipate a great amount of exaggeration by all parties. As both are in Aquarius, we can expect some far-out conspiracy theories too. Aquarius and Uranus rule outer space. It may get very “other-worldly” now. In fact, it has already started. Try to stay grounded and “in the science.”

From another market perspective, we note that transiting Saturn was in a square aspect to Venus in the New York Stock Exchange’s founding chart last week (January 22-February 8). Mars will also enter an important aspect to this chart’s Mercury/Pluto square the week surrounding February 19-22. But beyond that looms the transit of Pluto in Capricorn (the planet of “intervention” and “liquidation”), forming a T-Square with the Saturn/Neptune opposition in this same chart, starting in March, and lasting through the rest of the year. I think we are soon to see more regulations and interventions in the U.S. financial markets in the name of protecting the small investor. I think the real Robinhood and his merrymen would find this a cause to reload their quivers. They aren’t going down without a fight for their rights to trade without interference, even if they have to relocate and learn how to “Think or Swim” and develop a knack for a “Streetsmart Edge.”