Most traders use technical analysis (TA) to foretell crypto’s future movements. Maren Altman uses astrology.

Altman has amassed a large and significant social media following for her content bridging astrology and crypto. So massive she is under scrutiny for her relationship with crypto lender Celsius Network, including receiving marketing payments, before it sought bankruptcy protection.

This article is part of CoinDesk's "Trading Week."

How big? With 1.4 million followers on TikTok, 204,000 subscribers on YouTube, 237,000 on Twitter and 141,000 on Instagram, Altman says she is “your personal poet for the stars.”

Altman studied philosophy at New York University and is an avid fan of punk rock music such as My Chemical Romance. She joined TikTok and started her journey down the crypto rabbit hole during the end of her last semester of college, circa April-May 2020.

Despite being new to crypto at a time when BTC was worth less than $10K, Altman said early on she was seeing “correlations between planetary cycles and cryptocurrency markets.”

The euphoria from the subsequent bull run of 2021 helped funnel a wave of people into Altman’s social media channels. Some were interested in her astrological predictions while others were simply curious about the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.

Read more: How Crypto Traders Are Weathering the Bear Market

To be clear, she does not think crypto's price action is actually caused by the position of certain planets in the solar system, and she does use technical analysis in forming her trading strategies.

However, a planet’s position in the solar system at any given time is “a pretty good indicator,” Altman said to CoinDesk. “I’m very clear about it being correlation, not causation.”

For Altman, the skill of pattern recognition she developed through astrology is the same skill she uses when analyzing a candlestick chart in technical analysis.

“Both technical analysis and astrology use the same mechanism where you’re looking at past cycles to predict the future,” Altman says. “One simply has a lot of pop culture with magic around it and the other is a little more academic sounding.”

According to Altman, astrology fundamentally relies on the same critical assumption as technical analysis: History repeats and past patterns will typically hold in the future.

Altman’s astrological trading strategy

That's why Altman’s trading strategy includes both technical analysis and astrology.

For technical analysis, Altman uses simple indicators such as support and resistance levels as well as moving averages.

Altman’s astrology patterns used for trading bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) are “very similar to first-order logic: If this is there, then this happens. Those will influence what I plan to enter or exit that day.”

Read more: Why Trading Is Essential for Crypto

Altman has a number of different astrological indicators, including:

• If “Mars or Saturn are at an exact angle to any planets in bitcoin’s charts, that’s a bearish indicator and that will last generally a few days. During that time, I will look to short.”
• If the night has a full moon, represented by the white circles in the crypto chart below, then a price rally typically occurs in the following few days. Altman notes, "We generally dump into full moons and pump out of them."
• If the night has a new moon, then the market is at a local top. New moons are represented by the purple circles in the chart below.

Altman said on average out of 10 trades made based on her use of astrology, six to seven are profitable, typically. Most of the capital she has made was through shorting on an hourly basis during bearish periods.

Even though Altman uses astrology as a way to gain a consistent edge for her trading strategy, she told CoinDesk, “You can trade very well without astrology, no doubt, but you cannot trade without TA. There’s just no way to enter and exit a trade and manage your risk without TA.”

Boring, sideways bear market? What then?

While bitcoin cracked $20,000 on Oct. 25, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization had been ranging around $19,000 for the past 30 days, as CoinDesk noted on Oct. 20.

Crypto traders, who historically love volatility in the markets, are in a bit of a lull because bitcoin’s 30-day volatility was at its lowest point in almost two years last week.

Altman said, “During this time, it’s a little bit frustrating for traders, even myself, that the market is not moving a ton. So I find myself not as interested. In this period I don’t think there’s a better time to build because you’re not being swayed by euphoria.”

Read More: 9 Survival Tips for Crypto Winter

Altman is currently building what she calls an “astrology-based blockchain ecosystem” called Astrace, which is “bridging the gap between planets and profits,” according to the homepage.

Using the same first-order logic of “if-then” Altman uses, Astrace’s algorithm is intended to predict the price movements of cryptocurrencies.

According to Altman, Astrace’s algorithm analyzes planetary data, such as the position and movement of Jupiter in the Earth’s solar system, for its predictions.

Financial astrology is not new: Astrology trading software exists, and day traders have already been using astrology.

Through Astrace, Altman will be attempting to combine two areas outside the traditional finance mainstream: blockchain technology and astrology.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 2015 likened blockchain to magic. Altman, perhaps with the stars as her guide, is working at reinforcing and strengthening the bridge between astrology and crypto.

“I hope to be a journalistic documentation of how the strategy plays out, but that’ll take a few years,” she said.

Read More: 15 Ways to Stay Sane While Trading Crypto

Past and current predictions

On Jan. 22, 2022, Altman tweeted, “may 10th + october 28th. do what you will.” The tweet is currently pinned on her Twitter profile.

The crypto markets on May 10 and May 11 were in “a sea of red,” CoinDesk reported. Terra’s LUNA token dropped as much as 96%, BTC declined by roughly 6%, ETH slid 9% and Solana’s SOL token decreased by 30% in the span of 24 hours.

Altman is expecting similar market movements in the near future.

Altman’s bearish sentiment is based on several astrological indicators: the Oct. 25 solar eclipse occurring in the constellation Scorpio, and Jupiter re-entering the constellation Pisces on Oct. 28.

“This week has several astrological shifts that do hint towards quite a move towards the downside in terms of the market," Altman said in a video posted on TikTok and Twitter. "It’s literally going to be a big week, like worldwide everything.”

Meanwhile, the CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), a broad-based market index that measures the performance of a basket of cryptocurrencies, slid 0.94% in the past 24 hours but has climbed 7.6% since Monday, Oct. 24.

Do your own research.

UPDATE (Oct. 28 07:36:42 UTC): Clarified sentence after the Bitcoin Price vs Full and New Moon Cycle chart.