Astrologers welcome SEBI warning; rue lack of public data

"Do not be guided by astrological predictions on share prices and market movements," market regulator SEBI recently cautioned the investors.

Reacting to the SEBI's warning, famous market astrologer Ashok Motiani, who runs a website IndianMarketAstrologer.com, said: "I welcome SEBI's decision to caution investors regarding astrological prediction on particular company's share price.
"Not, that good astrologer can not predict about individual/specific company's stock prices but it is due to lack of correct data's available to the astrologer," he said.
Motiani, however, asserted that SEBI should also issue warnings against trading calls given by brokers, traders and analysts on TV channels, especially during market hours, as it creates room for manipulations.

Another astrologer Satish Gupta of AstroStockTips.in said that most of the fundamental and technical analysts fell flat with their predictions in the recent meltdown, but many of the astrological predictions were proven true.

Hoping that the SEBI advice would keep investors away from those so-called astrologers who were in fact making predictions based on technical analysis, Gupta said that he did not find any problems due to lack of public data on companies, as he does not look at the individual companies and was rather focused on sectors.Motiani listed out details like "date, time and place of birth of the company, first date of listing/trading in the stock exchange, horoscope of majority share holder" as necessary things to predict company's share prices.

"All the activities in this universe including stock market are controlled/influenced by the movement of planets in the zodiac," Gupta said.

"The 12 houses of the horoscope are deposer of various commodities/articles, which denote their respective stock/sectors and whenever a particular planet transit through specific house, stocks denoting the commodities/article in that particular house is geared depending upon the strength or weakness of the planet resulting in upward or downward movement in the prices of the relative stocks," he added.

Gupta further said that "if time is good for a company or a sector, it automatically gets support from all sides, be it the government, investors or others.

"For example, if the time is good for defense sector and we can see many big corporate houses venturing into this space and the government also pushing in for the growth of the sector. You can call it destiny."

"If things are good for a particular sector, the companies operating their automatically get benefited. Within the sector, the bigger and stronger companies obviously tend to fare better than others as they get the maximum support from government, investors etc," Gupta said.

Motiani, on the other hand, noted that "even if the all the correct datas are available, you need a brilliant astrologer to predict it accurately, and there are not many good financial astrologers."

He added that SEBI's decision did not affect him, as he does not predict about company shares and was focused on predicting the direction of the market.

"Investors come to us because our predictions have proven true. Our clients would not come back, if our predictions prove wrong," another eminent astrologist said, while claiming that many of his past predictions having proven true.

Motiani, however, said that he "always claimed to be right 80 per cent of the time and 20 per cent of the time wrong, which is better than any analyst, any economist, any where in the world."

Further, he asserted that "as SEBI has advised investors of being cautious of astrologers, SEBI should also issue warning regarding all the trading calls given by brokers, traders and analysts every morning on TV channels when market opens, because 50 per cent of the time they go wrong."

"Investors/traders are likely to loose their capital by following these calls. There is lot of manipulation can also happen. Hence SEBI should allow these calls only after market hours, based purely on fundamentals of the company and not on technicals."
Many of these astrologers and the websites charge an average of about Rs one lakh a year for their generalised predictions, but fees are much higher for customised predictions and for high-networth clients.