I swear I wasn’t going to do this. I’ve always been the guy who rolls his eyes at all that horoscope garbage, especially the financial stuff. Like, your portfolio is determined by Jupiter’s orbit? Gimme a break. But you know what? Things were tight. Really tight. My usual aggressive crypto plays had turned into aggressive drains on my bank account. I was sitting there, staring at a screen of red numbers for three weeks straight, just feeling totally paralyzed.
I was hunting for some kind of sign, any sign, that wasn’t another technical indicator. I saw a friend share a post, just a screenshot of this Daniel Dowd guy’s weekly memo for Pisces. I’m a Pisces, totally irrelevant, but I clicked it. I saw the headline: Your Full Financial Forecast Is Here! I figured, what the hell. My own “forecast” was looking like a dumpster fire.
The Terrible Decision to Commit
I read the damn thing. It was full of cosmic-sounding nonsense. Words like “mercurial shift,” “avoid the illusion of short-term gains,” and “focus on the terrestrial.” I had to look up what terrestrial meant. It basically boiled down to: get out of fast-moving tech stocks and dump your cash into something ancient and boring. Something related to ‘grounded infrastructure.’
I had a decent chunk of money sitting in a relatively safe, well-known tech ETF—the one everyone told me was safe. I’d been holding it for months, and it was the only thing keeping me afloat. The “astrological advice” was to sell it all.
My stomach twisted up. I mean, my entire logical brain was screaming at me. This is insane. This is how people lose their houses. But I was so frustrated by my own “smart” decisions failing, I had this moment of pure, raw desperation. I decided to treat this weekly memo like a technical paper from an analyst I secretly hated but had to follow. I was going to follow the instructions to the letter just to see the damn thing fail. That was the goal: prove it wrong and find my direction again.
I logged into my brokerage account. My hand hovered over the “Sell All” button for the tech ETF for what felt like an hour. I swear, my actual, logical brain was in a fight with my lizard brain. The lizard brain won. I took a huge gulp of cold coffee and slammed the mouse button down. It was done. The cash was liquid. The tech ETF I was holding dropped 5% the next day. Okay, first point for the Fish Man. Pure, dumb luck, I told myself.
Executing the “Terrestrial” Purchase
Now I had to figure out what the hell “terrestrial” meant in actual stock terms. The memo was vague, mentioning things like “the foundation of industry,” “the bedrock of commerce,” and “assets that exist beneath the ground.” I started searching. I skipped over mining companies—too techy. I skipped over railroads—too cyclical.
I landed on cement and heavy construction aggregates. Actual gravel, stone, and the stuff that makes roads. It felt laughably stupid. I found three regional concrete manufacturing companies with decent dividends, all trading flat for the last six months. They were the opposite of exciting. They were stocks your grandpa bought and forgot about.
I committed all the liquidated cash, splitting it between the three tickers. I meticulously keyed in the buy orders, triple-checking to make sure I wasn’t buying some weird penny stock. The process was slow. It was deliberate. The execution of the strategy felt utterly ridiculous.
Why this level of commitment to a joke? Because I needed that cash fast. I had this massive headache with my landlord. They were trying to pull some shady move with my lease, and I needed enough cash to pay a retainer for a decent lawyer and also cover the first month’s rent if I had to find a new spot quickly. My regular portfolio would have needed weeks to recover. This was a Hail Mary pass born of bureaucratic rage.
The Aftermath and the Ironic Payoff
For two days, absolutely nothing happened. The three stocks barely moved a fraction of a percent. I checked the market news 50 times a day. I felt like an idiot. I’d traded certainty for a cosmic lottery ticket. I was pacing, sweating, ready to pull the plug and just take the small loss.
But the instructions were for a “weekly” cycle. I forced myself to wait until the end of the week. I did it because I was documenting this whole foolish process—I couldn’t quit halfway and make my report look weak.
Then, on Friday, it happened. Not because of a transit of Mars, but because of a massive, local announcement.
- A regional infrastructure bill had been quietly signed into law, completely unexpected by the major news outlets.
- It affected the state where two of my three “boring” companies did 90% of their business.
- Their stock prices shot up. Seriously, like rockets.
It was a 15% combined gain. I didn’t wait around for the next week’s moon cycle. I immediately executed the sell orders and took the profit. I yanked the cash straight out of the trading account. The whole process, from the initial skeptical ‘Sell All’ to the final cash-out, took five days and generated enough money to hire the best damn lawyer in the city.
Did Daniel Dowd know about the local government bill? Absolutely not. Was it a financial forecast? No. It was a statistical anomaly driven by blind adherence to a stupid rule. But here’s the thing: my own strategy was failing because I was too scared to make a hard choice. The stars didn’t give me luck; they gave me discipline. They forced me to commit to a binary decision—a decision I never would have made on my own—and that commitment is what paid for my legal fees. That’s the real practice log right there. Sometimes you need a ridiculous reason to finally pull the trigger.
