"Millionaires don't use astrologers. Billionaires do." The line has been circulating for years, always attributed to J.P. Morgan, one of the most powerful bankers in American history. There is just one problem: there is no record that he ever said it.
Karen Christino, biographer of Evangeline Adams, found the earliest record of the line in a column by Sydney Omarr in 1989, more than seventy years after Morgan's death. Nobody has ever found a source from his lifetime. Everything suggests it is a made-up quote, the kind that becomes true from being repeated so often.
The curious part is that the story behind the myth is more interesting than the fake quote, and much easier to verify.
The astrologer who said she advised the most powerful banker in the country
According to Evangeline Adams herself, Morgan was her client for years. In her autobiography, published in 1926, she wrote: "I know of the late J.P. Morgan's belief in astrology because, well, because I taught it to him." The Morgan Library says it has no record of a relationship between the two.
Adams was a prestigious figure. She had an office in Carnegie Hall, in New York, took clients by mail, wrote a newspaper column and hosted a radio show. And Morgan was far from her only client of that kind: a 2014 Yale thesis by Nick Levine and an article by Carrie Tirado Bramen in the Journal of Cultural Economy point to presidents of the New York Stock Exchange from the same era among Adams's clients.
In 1914, she was prosecuted in New York for fortune telling, a practice the state's law prohibited. She was acquitted, and the judge in the case went as far as declaring that she raised astrology "to the dignity of an exact science." It is in the court record.
The White House that cleared its schedule with an astrologer
The most documented case of all involves the White House.
After the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981, Nancy Reagan began consulting the astrologer Joan Quigley almost daily, by phone, for seven years. The revelation came from inside the administration itself: Chief of Staff Donald Regan wrote in his book For the Record that "virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time" was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes.
The reach went far beyond the social calendar. According to Regan and to Quigley herself (who wrote her own book about the period, What Does Joan Say?), the astrologer influenced the date of the president's cancer surgery, the timing of the Geneva Summit with Gorbachev, presidential debates, speeches, the time of the signing of the 1987 nuclear missile treaty and every takeoff and landing of Air Force One. Quigley's papers are now cataloged and available in the archive of the Hoover Institution, at Stanford. It is a public historical collection.
The trader who "saw" the 1987 crash coming
In the early twentieth century, W.D. Gann was already mixing geometry, mathematics and astrology to time entries and exits in the market, and his followers cite his annual forecast for 1929, written in November 1928, as a prediction of that year's crash. His method is still disputed by technical analysts, but the use of astrology as a tool for reading the market is a documented part of Wall Street history.
Decades later, Arch Crawford followed a similar path, only from inside the traditional financial system. He started his career in 1961 at Merrill Lynch, as an assistant to one of the leading technical analysts on Wall Street at the time. In 1963, a front-page Wall Street Journal article about analysts who used astrology sparked his interest in the subject. In 1977, he founded the newsletter Crawford Perspectives. Barron's called him "Wall Street's best-known astrologer" after one specific episode. According to Crawford himself, he had predicted the market top for August 24, 1987, with a margin of three days, followed by a sharp fall. The Dow Jones peaked on August 25 and, on October 19, dropped 22.6% in a single day.
Venture capital betting on it now, in 2025
This is still happening. On July 25, 2025, Bloomberg published a story about the astrology boom in India and the venture capital funds that started investing in startups in the sector. The article quotes commodities and currency trader Jay Patel, 43, who uses planetary charts and lunar cycles to decide on trades. One of the trades he remembers most was a call option timed to a specific astrological window, which returned more than 90 times the amount invested.
The market context helps explain why this is attracting investment: according to Bloomberg, astrology in India alone is already a US$7 billion industry. Market research firms such as Allied Market Research estimate the global astrology market at somewhere around US$12.8 billion in 2021, with a projection of US$22.8 billion by 2031 (the numbers vary from source to source, and they are best treated as estimates). A single app in the sector, Co-Star, announced in 2021 that it had passed 20 million downloads.
Where this was never a secret
All the cases above have one thing in common: they happened quietly. Morgan did not publicly announce his astrologer. The Reagan White House kept the subject secret until 1988, and the couple denied that astrology had decided any policy. Crawford and the new generation of financial traders in 2025 are the exception.
There is a whole culture where this never needed to be a secret. In India, choosing the right moment to start something important, called muhurta, is everyday practice. Opening a company, launching a store, signing a big contract: it is common to check the position of the Moon, the nakshatra of the day and the strength of the planets before setting the date. It is a practice that goes back generations, well before any Wall Street trader. The KP method Vedik uses also starts from the idea that timing weighs on a decision.
What this history teaches
None of the cases above proves that astrology calls the market, and anyone who says otherwise is promising more than any method can support. The pattern that shows up is a different one, and more interesting: the people who used it had plenty of serious analysis. They were bankers with the best analysts in the world at their disposal, a White House with all the intelligence of the state available, traders with a Bloomberg terminal on the desk. Even so, they looked for one more layer, alongside the analysis.
It is the same split that applies to any big decision. The merit of a choice (is it a good deal, is it the right person, is it the right city) is one question. Whether now is the right time is another question, completely different, and it is the one where even people with every resource in the world keep looking for help.
Where Vedik comes in, and where it does not
It is worth being direct about the limits. Vedik is not a trading tool, does not analyze financial markets and does not give investment advice. Nothing here is a suggestion to buy or sell any asset.
What connects this history to what Vedik does is the principle: the same reasoning that took Morgan to Evangeline Adams, the White House to Joan Quigley, and that for generations has guided muhurta in India, is what lies behind the KP engine Vedik applies to your personal decisions, career, relationships, life changes. The question stays the same: given everything I already know, is now the right time?
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Before your next important decision, read your moment. Read your moment.
