With a variety of astrological factors working in tandem this week to drive stock prices higher through midweek, I was expecting to see a sell-off in equities get underway yesterday.

That didn’t happen.

Instead of pulling back, stock prices drove higher, with the S&P 5000 closing above the psychologically-important 1700 mark for the first time ever. The mainstream media is crowing this morning about the record rally that’s underway, instead of issuing warnings about a market correction waiting in the wings.

So we’ll see what happens today as trading gets underway.

One of the challenges in fine-tuning our market timing with astrology is that the astrological patterns that help drive the markets don’t always coincide with the exact hours that the markets themselves are open. The big Jupiter/Kronos alignment this week, for example, came hours after the closing bell in New York, rather than conveniently falling within the confines of the formal trading session.

When we’re doing our back-testing, of course, we’re primarily using daily historical data, so the calculations that go into our market forecasts don’t always match the exact dates of the upcoming market action. The net result is that we could be a day late or a day early in seeing the market phenomena suggested by the astrological factors at work.

So I’m looking for lower prices in equities today, since a pull-back wasn’t in evidence yesterday. Whether it’s attributed to profit-taking or genuine corrective impulses, a lower close in the S&P would be consistent with what we’ve seen astrologically.

But of course, the markets will always do whatever the markets choose to do, regardless of the precision of our back-testing, the carefulness of our forecasts, or the intensity of our hopes and wishes.

Remember that the basic rule in profitable astro-trading is to pay more attention to making money in the markets than to being 100% right in forecasting. That’s why we’ve currently got both long and short positions in the the Financial Cycles Model Portfolio– even if the market behavior doesn’t match our forecast, we’re confident that our trading strategies will continue to give us profitable results!