WD Gann, Cycles & Planets

There has been a lot written about WD Gann, both for & against his methods. I think those who discredit his work simply don’t understand it.

If you read Gann’s books or research other sources of information on Gann, you’ll quickly see, initially, it’s about numerology and cycles.

Delve a bit deeper into Gann’s works such as Tunnel Through the Air or The Magic Word and it becomes apparent that the ‘secret’ is in fact about planetary cycles and alignments. 

Gann’s “Master Time Cycle” is the 60 year cycle and this is related to Jupiter and Saturn’s conjunction (when they are in the same position in the sky). In fact, this conjunction occurs approximately every 20 years but after three of these cycles the planets not only appear together, but are approximately in the same location in the sky as 60 years before.

The more ‘recent’ Jupiter/Saturn conjunctions have been 19/02/1961, 03/01/1981 (& 24/07/1981 due to retrograde* motion), 29/05/2000 and 22/12/2020. As conjunctions can last a number of days for these larger planets, I’ve taken the appropriate mid-point dates in the following calculations and also omitted the retrograde* in 1981 from the following.

*Retrograde refers to a planet appearing to move backward across the sky from Earth's perspective, although the planets always orbit the Sun in the same direction. This is an "apparent motion" caused by Earth's faster orbital speed as it passes or is passed by other planets. 

19/02/1961 to 03/01/1981 is 7,259 days or 1,037 weeks or 240 months or 19.87 years.

03/01/1981 to 29/05/2020 is 7,087 days or 1,012 weeks or 234 months or 19.4 years.

29/05/2000 to 22/12/2020 is 7,513 days or 1,073 weeks or 248 months or 20.5 years.

The whole cycle from 19/02/1961 to 22/12/2020 is 21,859 days or 3,123 weeks or 722 months or 59.8 years.

As you can see, the whole 60 year cycle is around 56 days short of 60 years and whilst 56 days out of 21,859 days is a tiny discrepancy, the three 20 year cycles vary by up to 61 weeks - over a year!

Simply taking “Gann” cycles/periods from a date in the past and blindly projecting them forward by the same increment into the future is clearly going to give errors. The further the projection out from the start date, the larger the error.

Planetary movements do not fit an exact time frame every cycle.

Below is a chart of the Australian Stockmarket back to 1980. Planetary aspects, said to be both positive and negative, have been annotated. 

Those considered negative are higher on the chart, and those positive lower.

You can see that around the year 2000, Saturn and Uranus were at an aspect of 90 degrees (considered negative). There are 3 red dots around this time due to retrograde* motion (* see note above).

Again, from early 2020 to December 2021, these two larger planets were at the 90 degree negative angle again.

It’s common knowledge what happened in 2000 and 2020 to the stock market.

Another example is the Jupiter Saturn aspect (orange dots), also at 90 degrees. Again, due to retrograde motion, these 3 alignments occured from late 2015 to mid 2016. The All Ords Index fell approx 20% (intraday high to low) around this time.

This same relationship occurred from August 2024 and it will occur 3 times, due to the retrograde motion, with the third time being around June 2025. At the time of writing the All ORDS Index has fallen approx 17% (intraday high to low) so far.

Coincidence?

Before computers, as these aspects change constantly, this research would have taken hundreds if not thousands of hours - a life time! In modern times computer software has aided the task, although this can be prohibitively expensive, for many, but also complex to use.

With computer software, stockmarket data is also required. Again, at considerable expense from a data provider or requiring the skill and time to prepare from other online sources.

There is an alternative to assist your research - our Aspectarian files.

Using our Aspectarian files, which can be viewed in a browser or downloaded into a secure app for PC or mobile (iOS and android) and many other platforms, you can instantly look through decades of data - in fact 130 years! All the aspects are worked out and colour coded for you.

As they say, a picture paints a thousand words - you can instantly see important planetary relationships considered negative (45, 90 or 180 degrees) colour coded in shades of red, or those considered positive (30, 60 or 120 degrees) in shades of green. Conjunctions are shown in cream.

Either scroll through the Aspectarian files to find important relationships and then look to stock market charts. Or, look for important dates in the stock market (highs, lows etc), and look up the dates in the Aspectarian files to see if any significant planetary relationships had occurred around that time.

For individuals not familiar with reading Ephemeris files, this time consuming and complex work has become available to everyone.

Understanding that some people will want to research back further than others, and indeed not all data is available back to 1900, we have broken the Aspectarian files into approximately 30 year periods for older data. More recent data is in approximately 10 year files.

Geocentric planet relationships (looking from the earth) which are most often used in this type of research, go back to 1900.

Heliocentric planet relationships (looking from the Sun) are in our 2020-2030 Aspectarian file.

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