I backtested astrology as a crypto trading strategy. Jupiter was my portfolio manager, Mercury my risk assessor. It made +3.4% in 45 days, beating every other bot I built :| But there's a catch.

I tried something fun and fed real astrology rules to AI and had it build trading bots for ETH. Actual planetary positions and real astronomy rules.

I tried 4 bots, backtested and ran out of sample tests. Results:

The moon phase bot (long on full moon, short on new moon) did 13 trades in 6 weeks and lost money. It woke up twice a month, looked at the moon, lost money and went back to sleep.

The Mercury retrograde bot (stops trading when Mercury goes backwards) had a 55% win rate and still lost 2,515 bps because it round tripped 492 times paying 12 bps each way. Also the AI used a rough approximation for Mercury's position so the bot thought Mercury was direct when it wasn't. The astrology was kinda rough here.

Then the Jupiter bot. Jupiter enters earth signs = wealth transit = go long. This one made +338 bps and I felt like a genius for about ten minutes. Then I checked the entry reasons. Jupiter never entered an earth sign during the test period. Not once. The main rule never fired. The bot made 100% of its money from RSI. The astrology was a spectator.

The full astrology bot (3 planets, void of course moon, home sign multipliers) lost 1,448 bps because Saturn sat in Aries the entire time making it short-biased into a market that was going up.

Total: -4,171 bps.

I also open-sourced the bots and so can use them too :) maybe someone can actually produce an astrological edge? But I doubt it...

Things I learned:

More rules ≠ more edge (Obviously). My simplest bot was lazy but harmless. My most complex bot was the terrible because every planetary rule was another constraint disconnected from price (or at least that's what my humble experiments reveal). Adding many signals just adds ways to be wrong just like in real TA strategies.

Full video with the backtests is on my profile. Disclosure: I built the platform the AI and bots run on. Do not trade based on astrology. Or do, I'm not your financial advisor, I'm barely my own!