Moneyspider in the News

There may be trouble ahead

Personal Finance & Savings

Financial astrology has really taken off in the US, with investors looking to the stars to track down the best investment profits, a phenomenon that now crossing the pond.

Investors in the US are currently looking at the stars for financial gain. By keeping an eye on financial movements, it is said that investors can predict the performance of currencies, stock markets, property prices and other financial asset classes.

Managing director of Moneyspider.com, Bill Ross, believes the introduction of financial astrology could be a ticking time bomb for many investors' finances: "It is worrying that there are specialist fund managers, such as The Astrologer Fund, incorporating planetary movements within there standard calculations and this is, in our view, quite frankly dangerous for investors."

"It is one thing to have a bit of fun with the likes of Mystic Meg et al, but would anyone in their right minds seriously want to invest their hard earned cash on the basis of the relative positions of celestial bodies?"

" Who is the sensible investor most likely to believe, a research service like Moneyspider.com which constantly monitors all 2,000 or so funds available to UK investors and comparing fund performance over 1, 3 and 5 years, or a man in a pointy hat rambling on about when Mercury is rising in Gemini, or whatever."

If more evidence is needed then look no further than the following example. Commissioned research from The British Association for the Advancement of Science saw a professional investor, a financial astrologer and a five-year old child invest a fictional £5,000 on the FTSE100. The investor chose shares on the basis of his experience, the astrologer based her decisions on the 'birthdate' of companies and the child chose her shares randomly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the child lost the least amount of money and the financial astrologer made the largest losses.

Ultimately, it's up to each individual investor to make their financial decisions based on the time of investing and then again when they come to sell. Markets can be so fluid, rising and falling at the blink of an eye, that at the end of the day the investor needs to be 100 per cent comfortable with and confident of the decisions they are making.