(9 August 2026)  Stocks were higher across the board last week as Friday's jobs report made a Fed interest rate hike less likely at its September meeting.  The S&P 500, small cap Russell 2000 and Dow all pushed to new all-time highs, and the NASDAQ is now within 1% of its early June peak. While I thought the stars were aligning for a mostly bullish August, the extent of last week's gains was somewhat unexpected.  I had thought that we might have seen at least one or two down days last week in the aftermath of the two Saturn alignments.  Our backtest suggested that Saturn's 45-degree semisquare with the North Lunar Node (Rahu) on July 30 was often correlated with negative market returns in the days following its exact alignment. However, I had wondered if its bearish influence had simply manifested early as indicated by the updated cumulative trend chart below. Last week's rally has taken the current alignment (red line) above the long term average of previous alignments in which Saturn is also retrograde as it is now.  It...