Dow plunges 500 points as financial turmoil deepens

The Dow lost 500 points today as Wall St. tried to assess the implications of the bankruptcy of Lehman as the financial crisis deepened over the weekend. The Dow closed at 10,917 while the S&P finished the day at 1192. The S&P close below 1200 was below the previous July low of 1200 while the Dow nears its 2008 intraday low set back in January of 11,700.

This is very close to my prediction of two weeks ago in my long term outlook on my website -- repeated in last week's regular weekly forecast in my regular Market Jyotish blog -- that the markets would fall back to 11,000 and retest previous lows on either the 12th or 15th of September. The central astrological culprit was the trinal aspect of Rahu to Mars which happened to fall on the natal Saturn of the USA chart. Unlike many other configurations which are sometimes open to a lot of interpretation, this seemed like a clearer bearish indicator.

It's possible we will go lower tomorrow, although I'm not at all certain. It is hard to precisely correlate price magnitude with levels of planetary affliction. We should see some buying later in the week at least, although Friday looks negative. The market looks quite negative for the coming weeks. More significant declines are likely in early October and then again in the first week of November. The November decline looks worst and may be on the order of 10% or more in a single day. There's a good chance that the November decline will become known as a "crash".

I'm not sure where or when we might see the bottom but anything is possible here, including all the way down to 7500 and the 2002 lows by December. In other words, we may have another 25-30% to go in the short term. This is admittedly a worse case scenario, but the planets are indicating a grim mood in the coming weeks. A best case scenario might be a decline of another 10% -- down to 9700. That seems far too optimistic, however. I think the early October decline will put us under 10,000 as it is.