Maren Altman is a Star – Cointelegraph Magazine

Are future prices written in the stars? Meet the prescient cryptocurrency nominee Maren Altman, who combines astrology and crypto day trading into a winning mix.

In 1973, Burton Malkiel, a professor at Princeton University, published his book A random walk down Wall Street, in which he states that a “blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper could select a portfolio that would do as well as a portfolio carefully selected by experts”.

Fast forward to 2013, and Rob Arnott, CEO of Research Affiliates, conducted research mimicking monkeys using AI and actually found that monkeys did a much better job than the experts and the stock market. Closer examination proved that success was the result of randomly selecting companies through the “monkey approach”, optimizing their success. However, it is a sobering thought that not only machines but perhaps primates can surpass humans in stock picking.

It’s a small step, perhaps, to examine the potential of astrology to determine the future price of Bitcoin. Unlike a stock, whose performance is dictated by both a company’s trading performance and the industry it operates in, technical analysts’ predictions for Bitcoin price movements depend on examining charts and patterns, similar to those made by astrologers.

In the gutter, looking at the stars

So, how to predict Bitcoin price with astrology? Enter Maren Altman, who calls herself “your personal star poet, especially on TikTok,” and has made a name for herself over the past two years using astrology to predict price — but not without causing controversy .

“I’ve always been the weird girl who asked people about their star signs. In college, I earned pocket money doing people’s charts at parties. I’ve always been fascinated by the astrology.

It was a natural fit for Altman to run Bitcoin across the charts, using the genesis block as its birthdate – after all, anything with a birthdate can be plugged into the astrology charts. Altman bought bitcoin in 2017 but had largely forgotten about it until she became interested again in March 2020 when she was studying philosophy at NYU, along with the rest of the student population – nothing like a good pandemic and a spike in prices to generate interest.

“I grew up with astrology where patterns and cycles are followed. I was also familiar with financial astrology, so it made sense to apply it to cryptocurrency,” says Altman.

It’s a big call

One of her first notable calls was in January 2021, where she observed that the new moon in Capricorn on January 13 looked big for Bitcoin. She then predicted a decline followed by a bull run. His call was prescient, with Bitcoin continuing to double in price ahead of April. To counter this, she predicted all-time highs in May, with largely unremarkable success, and Bitcoin instead flounders into its first notable drop of 2021.

Becoming a day trader proved profitable for Altman, but it was not without stress.

“It was not enough to call the price; I had to be able to perform,” she says. “And, some days, I made mistakes and lost money, but it wasn’t the charts fault but my mistakes.”

She sees astrology as a giant mirror where certain signifiers of planetary alignments represent themes such as global growth, even aggression or world peace. By reading these patterns and overplaying them on what has already happened, it can trace future movements or, in the case of cryptocurrency, prices.

Altman acknowledges that charts can be difficult to read – there is a pattern system but also multiple cycles that can lead to misreads. That said, she is still ahead of the game.

“Anyway, I’m 100% transparent with my trades. I share everything,” she says.

She started chatting and posting on social media in earnest in the summer of 2020, and today she has over 1 million followers on TikTok and over 2 million combined across all her social networks.

“It just exploded in the summer of 2020,” Altman says.

When asked why she gained such traction, Altman shrugs.

“I’m a bit of a character. I’m young, I’m a woman and I wear mostly red. But, I’m also serious, I don’t get dumb and I make a living from crypto. Guess it just exploded in a perfect storm of weirdness.

Did she predict January 6 or did she just read the papers?

It could also be due to his humor and the appeal of both Biden’s presidential victory and the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising, though political majors may have had similar success reading the papers.

She also picked up a number of high-profile features from top publications such as The Washington Post, Reuters and The New Yorker — not magazines that frequently publish highly unlikely predictions.

Scrolling through her popular TikToks at one point talking about returning NFTs, she explains that she made a deposit on an apartment in Dubai by returning an NFT. It’s quite inspiring.

However, her income comes mainly from her business and she is reluctant to do much monetization of her social networks.

“I’ve been hesitant to partner with paid sponsors because everyone in crypto hates people who monetize their social media. It’s just not done,” she explains.

She has written several articles for crypto traders and for market analyst Mati Greenspan on his Quantum Economics platform, but she is not directly employed by him.

In other interviews, she mentions her astrology academy, where she offers astrology training to paying clients. There are approximately 150 paying customers. She says she has 1,000 people in her community of members who pay between $7 and $50 a month for her teachings.

Carve a route through the storm

At this point, I ask if she has had much hindsight. Yes, she did, to the point of having to flee the country because of death threats.

“New York wasn’t safe for me anymore, so I went to stay with friends in Dubai,” she says.

Altman is back in New York when we speak, but she’s referring to the trolling campaign led by a 2021 article in Rolling Stone where she was called a white supremacist, racist, homophobic and transphobic, among others. Worryingly, given his following, he accused her of plagiarism.

There’s a lot to unpack in the series of tweets and articles written around this time. BIPOC astrologers in the same field, such as AstroDim, said Altman initially dispelled their comment that President Biden would die in office, but then reposted similar predictions later.

In other social media outbreaks, Altman, a vegan, has used inflammatory images and text in support of her food choices. Again, this caused negative reactions.

the more important you have to say, the more others will misrepresent you and take you out of context.

the key is to remember that what you have to say is more important than being silent.

— MAREN (@marenaltman) January 7, 2022

BIPOC astrologers in the same article also argued that there is a general bias against BIPOC people on social media platforms, particularly targeting TikTok.

The biggest complaint made against Altman by BIPOC astrologers in this 2021 Rolling Stone article is that when Altman talks about the same topics as them, she gets more views. It might say more about America than astrology.

Altman apologized in a number of videos about her comments and videos about gender fluidity, trans people and animal/meat eaters before going offline during Mercury retrograde when she went to Dubai.

According to Altman, she was not stalked by crypto heads but rather by “spiritual lunatics” who made up many of their claims.

She certainly gets a lot of attention – good and bad – and there’s even a Twitter account featuring an archive of her most notable tweets where she claims, among other things, that artificial insemination for dairy cows is a form of sexual assault.

Promoting eating disorders as well as a permanent moral superiority complex pic.twitter.com/BImU7tO5Lf

— tweets from maren altman (@marenaltmantwe1) February 9, 2021

Altman says she went to the police when the threats escalated and she now has security.

A wire : #astrotwitter 2 nights ago I was shocked to see Maren Altman tweeting that she has a legal team dealing with the recent incident involving her with the rest of the astro community, it wasn’t pretty…

— Jalin (@C_Jalin) February 12, 2021

What we do know for sure if you believe the charts, however, is that she’s guaranteed more success in her future.

“Not famous, because that’s a very loaded word, but I always knew I would make it. Oddly enough, my own astrology charts are all about finance, and that never made sense to me until here.

“Over time, I will move away from day trading and into angel investing, but first I need to build my capital.”