Career October 2010 - updated and posted 5th March 2011

I've just discovered forecasts that I made in October, and set aside to see if they come up trumps or not. Here they were:

Extracts from forecast 1:

Your career will be on fire this month, too. A source of income may show up or change on October 12 due to the Sun moving over a mathematical degree of the eclipse of last July 11. October 20 should be fantastically exciting too, for Mars will reach out to Jupiter in your house of fame, and you may get a shot of publicity or a wonderful offer that proves to be quite prestigious. More happy career surprises are due over October 22-25 - news will come out of the blue and light you up brilliantly! Apparently you will have that certain something that everyone is clamoring to get - expertise, goods, or services. This is not the month to hide in your apartment!

Forecast 2:

Your ruler shifts into the hardest-working angle of your chart on Thursday. Maybe not thrilling news, but certainly useful. Over the next three weeks you'll see huge progress in your career

What happened? In the last week of October I got a 3 month consulting engagement, that led (so far) so a further month's consulting. So not huge career development nor (yet) the start of something massive, but definite improvement in my professional life.

Spot on

"October 3 is due to be a banner day for love."

Absolutely right. Big banner day.

If we bear in mind that this big banner day has, in retrospect, been building up for a month, this makes the prediction look good that August and September would be great months for romance (see below).

Here is another astrologer's forecast of the same weekend, also correct:

. . . at least one person is likely to be charmed by you - and your ability to relate to a situation they're presently coping with. It's possible that this is a long term friendship in the making.

However the "family snarl" hasn't been sorted out (see 2 below) so must be counted a miss.

Stepping on toes

Even though you like a lively exchange of ideas, you're encouraged to be as restrained as possible. At least for the moment. Certain individuals feel far more strongly about their ventures than you realise. What you regard as merely a humorous remark could hit home, if not actually be hurtful.

Absolutely spot on for my 9.30 am meeting this morning. Perhaps I should have listened more acutely too.

Sorting out a family snarl?

So here we are, waiting for the legal process to divorce us and for the property market to sell the family home. The forecase for this week seems very relevant:

Any family snarl-ups should start to sort themselves out, to everyone’s satisfaction, as Mercury, your ruler, strides forwards in the domestic angle of your chart. This is especially true if some sort of property deal is involved.

Its not quite a definite prediction, and it might refer to other "family snarls" perhaps so there might be different ways in which it could be correct. Lets see.

The value of being correct sometimes

I have been looking at horoscopes for a long time, and some of the results are in this blog. It seems to me that:

- horoscope predictions are right more often than can be explained by pure chance;
- horoscope predictions are right less than 50% of the time;
- there is a little consistency between astrologers. This doesn't mean astrology is rubbish, or at least no more than some people making better food than others means that cookery is rubbish.

You might not agree, but this is my opinion based on careful observation and thinking. Anyway, this is my blog.

The question then is "so what"?

First, a digression. Lets say that I had a way of predicting with 25% accuracy which horse would win a race in which (say) 12 horses start. If I chose a horse at random I have a 1/12 = 8% chance of being correct; so this prediction is much better than random but still a long way short of 50/50. Of course there are many non-random ways of choosing a winner, of which I might adopt some if I knew anything about horses. BTW the existence of other methods of prediction might or might not be beside the point -- see later.

In such a case the logical thing would be to back the predicted winner if the odds compensate you for the 75% probability that it would lose. But if you could know which outsiders had a 25% chance of winning, then over a period of time you should do well.

So how do we apply this to life? Some thoughts:

- You'd be silly to wager on a binary bet based on a astrological prediction unless the odds are very good. Perhaps this is why hardly anybody predicted the World Cup outcome successfully?

- If you've tracked the accuracy of a specific forecaster for a while, leave the door open to their forecasts being correct.

- Think about other ways of predicting the event in question that might give you a better or worse feeling of likelihood.

Some more thoughts in time.

Divorce foretold

On the 14th March I referred to a forecast that something big would happen the previous week:

What is sure is that Monday’s encounter between your ruler Mercury and the expansive Jupiter brings life-changing events.

I said then that it had been correct, although I didn't feel like spelling out the detail. What happened was that we out to dinner (to ensure good behaviour, as we are very well behaved in public places), and agreed that the 18-month process to prolong our marriage was over, and that we would seek a divorce.

The prediction was very emphatic and it was correct.

Here is another predictions that I read as having a bearing on this matter and that turned out correctly:

26th June to 2nd July: A long-term partnership or deep emotional commitment comes up for review this week, when the Moon’s eclipse in Capricorn could make you see the situation, and your options, in a new light.

That is when we made the appointment to see the mediator to help us work through the divorce on an uncontested basis.

There are others, particularly dealing with money luck, but I don't feel like exposing too much of my personal life on here.

I hope the following will be true too: Love has been erratic for you, but with Mars about to light your true love sector on July 29 until September 14, you'll start a two-month period where romance will be fun to find.

Inverse correctness

I have referred before to a prediction that was right in the area of my life that would see activity (career in that case) but 180 degrees out on the impact. I don't think this can be written off as spurious; the astrologer might equally have made a prediction about my health or about tall dark strangers, which didn't feature.

In June we had another example from the same astrologer: she predicted that

"The full moon lunar eclipse due on June 26 will bring a surprising and possibly even jarring situation to a head involving a certain financial matter. This will be a tough moment, because many planets will be fighting with one another in ways we have rarely seen. Everyone, of every sign, will notice tension in the air. "

Instead, what happened is that the company I had left in April advised me that they were paying out my bonus, which is quite a lot of money. So again: right date, right subject, wrong on the direction of the impact.

It is worth knowing that a certain area is due to be impacted; I'll have to track her specific predictions to see if she is always out by 180 degrees or if its just a case of being able to identify area and impact but not direction.

Then again, she predicted that in early June I would get a career boost from the intervention of my friends, especially if I was in some lines of business (one of which I am). That certainly hit true