Best Time to Buy: Why I Will Make a Purchase on June 24th

Clients and friends often ask me to find the best time to make major purchases. Sometimes this is for a financial instrument, such as stocks, and other times a coveted item for their collection. Astrology can help find the best time to buy something, particularly in cases where we buy anything that we want to appreciate in value. The most obvious application of this is financial, where we always want to sell higher than we bought (unless we are selling short, which is an entirely different story!), but the same applies to art, rare books, antiques, real property, commodities or raw materials, or even horses. Caution: even a great election will not make those Beanie Babies appreciate, so doing your real world research on the item’s value is essential.

I elect times to make important purchases for myself, too, mainly for buying stocks that I have previously researched and put through the quantitative wringer. The method I most often use is based on the writings of Dorotheus in his Carmen Astrologicum, Book V, Chapter 9. The reason June 24th is the best time to buy for profit is because there aren’t many good times to make purchases in July during U.S. stock market hours; this is the best time to buy for some weeks to come. If you are looking to buy something other than stocks and thus have more time flexibility, you *may* be able to find times in July that work. Much of this difficulty is because Jupiter and Venus are approaching a square of Saturn, making them unfit for representing us as buyers.

Dorotheus’ method is simple: the goods are symbolized by the Moon, while the planet from which it has most recently separated represents the seller, and the planet to which the Moon next applies is the buyer. The best time to buy will strengthen the buyer’s planet as much as possible while weakening the seller’s planet. The symbolism means that the seller loses, while the buyer gains by the trade. Dorotheus only makes a distinction between having the Moon separate from malefics and apply to benefics (or ensuring they aspect the buyer’s or seller’s planets), but in my experience, any strong planets will work for the buyer and weak ones for the seller.

What makes June 24th so special? For a few hours, the Moon separates from the Sun and applies to Mercury, so the seller is the Sun and the buyer is Mercury. Here is the horoscope for 10:54 A.M. Pacific Time in Los Angeles. It is part of a larger window of time that is favorable and could be used, but I chose Virgo rising as it is one of the auspicious houses in my natal horoscope.

Here are the strengths and weaknesses of the Sun and Mercury, shown using William Lilly’s dignity table so you may see my work:

The Sun (seller): peregrine (-5), 11th house (+4), slow in motion (-2), partile conjunct Mars (-5). The net is -8 points.

Mercury (buyer): in domicile (+5), 10th house (+5), slow in motion (-2), oriental (-2), not combust or under the Sun’s beams (+5). The net is +11 points.

Obviously, it is far better to be a buyer than a seller at this time.

This particular horoscope has a few “nice to haves,” borrowed from other methods, such as Mercury also ruling the first house of the buyer while placing the ruler of the seventh in the malefic 12th house. Note that here I ignore other methods, such as the condition of the second house of money, which is prioritized by other writers. This is a key lesson of electional astrology: use one method at a time, or you may lose your mind.

As to my purchase, I will keep track and keep you posted. No matter how good an individual stock is, it rarely withstands the weight of a dropping market, so that is one confounding factor with electional astrology being used for  buying stocks. Or maybe I will just go buy that rare book I’ve had my eye on this week.