Be It the Moon, Stars or Bad Luck, October Packs a Punch

Ah, October! The World Series stirs the soul. The leaves turn to deep reds and bright yellows.

And all hell breaks loose. Over and over again.

October, 1871: the Great Chicago Fire. October, 1911: the Manchu Dynasty falls in China. October, 1956: the Hungarian Uprising. October, 1962: the Cuban Missile Crisis. October, 1984: India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated.

Wall Street has not been immune. Most of the bear markets of the last 40 years--1957, 1960, 1962, 1966 and 1974--have hit their nadirs in October. There were the “massacres” of 1978 and 1979 and, of course, the crashes of 1929 and 1987. All in October.

And now a 190-point tumble. On Friday the 13th, no less.

There must be a reason. For everything there is a reason.

Perhaps it is the flow of the seasons, says Yale Hirsch, publisher of the Stock Trader’s Almanac, a font of market history.

Summer’s respite ends and a new business year begins in September, he figures. “You come into September and people who play the market are trying to gauge what’s going on,” Hirsch said Friday. By October, “they’ve made up their minds”--and, often, they’re none too optimistic.

Or perhaps it is the moon, which right now is up to no good.

According to WeatherData Inc. of Wichita, Kan., which supplies weather forecasts to The Times, Friday was the start of five days of extremely high tides along North American coasts. The moon is at fault: It is full, as close to the Earth as it ever gets, and it is just above the Equator.

The moon’s direct impact on the stock market is less than clear, however. “We were trying to find out if it’s possible to have a triple-witching hour on Friday the 13th,” one WeatherData wag said, “and we don’t think it is.”

Science doesn’t have a good explanation. Marcello Truzzi, director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., reports with regret that he has been unable to complete a study of Friday the 13th newspaper headlines to determine whether that date truly brings bad luck.

So we must turn to a seer.

“Most of the major planets are going into Capricorn, which is associated with Saturn and tight money,” said Los Angeles astrologer Sydney Omarr. “Everybody who’s asked me, whether celebrities or others, I’ve advised them to be very careful in connection with the market, because money is going to be very tight.”

(More conventional analysts Friday cited several reasons for the drop in the Dow industrial average, including the collapse of financing for some takeover deals and inflation fears--with its accompanying likelihood that the Federal Reserve Board would keep credit tight.)

What to expect next? The tides will subside. The leaves will be green again in spring. But it doesn’t sound as if Omarr will be leaping back into the market any time soon.

“September gives us an idea of what the previous year was,” he said. “October gives us presages of what the coming year will be like.”

Not a pretty picture.