Gann's Square of 9 and the Sarvatobhadra Chakra

Traders know the Gann Square of 9 — W. D. Gann's famous spiral grid for reading support and resistance off the geometry of price and time, the cornerstone of a whole school of astro trading. Far fewer know that classical Indian astrology had been doing something structurally similar for centuries before Gann was born — and on a far grander scale. The Sarvatobhadra Chakra, "the wheel that is auspicious from every direction," is a 9×9 lattice of eighty-one cells that attempts something quietly audacious: it fits the entire sky onto a single square. Not a chart of one moment, like the twelve-house horoscope, but a fixed master-grid holding all the moving parts of the heavens at once — the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the twelve signs, the thirty lunar days, the seven weekdays, and the fifty syllables of the Sanskrit alphabet. You take the day's planets, drop them onto the grid, and read the consequences by a principle called vedha, "piercing."

This is a story about both grids — what they are, why two cultures an ocean and eight centuries apart reached for the very same shape, and the one question neither tradition ever thought to ask. The Sarvatobhadra Chakra is the older and the richer of the two, so we will start there. Here is a working version — pick a planet and watch which lunar mansion it occupies and which cells it pierces.

This widget is a simplified preview — its exact cell placement is not yet locked to a classical source, and the planets are fixed to a sample date. But the idea is faithful: one square, the whole sky, read by lines of influence. What follows is what the real chakra is, how it was used to forecast prices and harvests, and why its resemblance to a famous Wall Street trading tool is both irresistible and a trap.

What the chakra is

The Sarvatobhadra Chakra is, structurally, a square of nine rows and nine columns — eighty-one cells, counted clockwise from the north-east corner (the īśāna koṇa, traditionally the most auspicious quarter). Each cell is a varga, a compartment, and the eighty-one break down with a tidy completeness: twenty-eight for the nakshatras, twelve for the signs, five for the lunar days and weekdays, sixteen for the vowels, and twenty for the consonants — twenty-eight plus twelve plus five plus sixteen plus twenty, exactly eighty-one (Sarvatobhadra Chakra, Wikipedia).

The layout is concentric, and the widget above follows it cell-for-cell. Every square carries a varga number from 1 to 81, counted clockwise from the north-east corner with east at the top. The outermost ring (vargas 1–32) carries the twenty-eight nakshatras on its edges — the sequence beginning, by the convention of the Swarodaya Śāstra, not at Aśvinī but at Kṛttikā — with a vowel in each of the four corners. Moving inward, the next ring (33–56) holds the consonant akṣaras; then a ring (57–72) of the twelve rashis; then the weekdays and tithis at the inner side-midpoints; and Pūrṇimā with Saturday at the very centre, varga 81. The result is a single static map onto which the entire vocabulary of Vedic time and sound has been projected. (The exact placement here follows M. K. Agarwal's manual; cell-by-cell layouts vary a little between sources, but the concentric order is the stable, canonical part.)

The chakra is not the invention of a single author. It surfaces across the medieval Jyotiṣa corpus: Janārdan Harji's Mānasāgarī treats it and supplies the rules for reading it; Gopesh Kumar Ojha set out a construction method in his commentary on the twenty-sixth chapter of Mantreśvara's Phaladīpikā; and the technique is traced in some lineages to the Brahmayāmala and to the Svarodaya literature of military and mundane prognostication (Wikipedia; Saptarishis Astrology, Sarvatobhadra Cakra). It is, in other words, a genuinely traditional instrument with a long manuscript pedigree — not a modern reconstruction.

Reading by vedha

The chakra does nothing on its own. It comes alive when you place a planet on the nakshatra it currently occupies and ask what that planet pierces. Vedha (वेध) means obstruction or piercing, and it is the chakra's single operative idea: a planet, sitting in its mansion, throws lines of influence across the grid, and whatever falls on those lines is "pierced" — activated for good or ill.

The lines are specific. A planet on a nakshatra pierces along three lines that fan across the chakra: one straight line to the nakshatra directly opposite it (its front vedha), and the two 45° diagonals that strike a further nakshatra on either side (its right and left vedha). Agarwal's manual tabulates all of them in a "Chart of Vedha" — the widget above reads its front/right/left targets straight from that table, and they fall exactly where the geometry predicts. The direction that is active depends on how the planet is moving: a planet in normal direct motion casts its principal vedha across, to the opposite cell; a planet moving fast casts to one side; a retrograde planet casts backward; and the Sun, Moon and the nodes pierce in all directions at once. The Sun and the lunar nodes, Rāhu and Ketu, have fixed forward-and-sideways vedha. The polarity depends on the planet: a benefic's vedha is favourable, a malefic's is destructive, and the effect strengthens when the planet is exalted or retrograde and weakens when it is debilitated — a benefic vedha can even cancel a malefic one.

The tradition then grades outcomes by how many vedhas converge on a point. The Mānasāgarī's rule is blunt: "one vedha results in conflict, two vedhas result in loss of wealth, three vedhas indicate defeat or failure, and four vedhas indicate death" (Wikipedia). Because the grid also holds the syllables of the alphabet, the same machinery reads onto names: a person, a company, or a commodity whose name begins with a pierced syllable is said to come under that influence — which is precisely the hook by which the chakra was later pointed at markets.

What it was used for

The chakra's home discipline is muhūrta, electional astrology — choosing an auspicious moment to begin something. If a malefic's vedha falls on the tithi, sign, nakshatra or weekday of a proposed start time, that moment is to be avoided; a clean, benefic-pierced moment is preferred. It was also a praśna tool, for answering a question when no birth chart is available, and a device for personal prediction keyed to one's birth nakshatra or name-syllable.

But the thread that matters for this site is the mundane one. Indian market astrology descends from the Saṃhitā or Medinī branch of Jyotiṣa — the astrology of collective conditions: weather, harvests, and the prices of commodities. That lineage runs from the Arghakāṇḍa, the "Section on Prices" in Varāhamihira's sixth-century Bṛhat Saṃhitā, down through the Teji-Mandi ("bull–bear") manuals of Indian commodity astrologers — a tradition we trace in detail in Jyotiṣa and the Market. The Sarvatobhadra Chakra slots naturally into that branch: it is used, in its modern financial-astrology incarnation, to forecast the share and commodity markets, national events, and the outcomes of contests, by watching the vedha of the transiting planets day by day. An entire cottage industry of courses and self-published papers now applies it to the Nifty and to gold.

That is exactly where the caution begins. The chakra is elegant, ancient, and internally consistent — and none of that is evidence that it works. The mundane literature, classical and modern alike, has always done the same thing: assert the rules, narrate a few striking hits, and stop. The piercing that "indicated" a crash is invariably pointed out after the crash. Whether that same configuration pierces just as often on calm days — the only question that matters — is one the tradition never asks.

The Gann parallel

Here the story takes an unexpected turn, because the Sarvatobhadra Chakra has a structural double in the unlikeliest place: the trading desk of William Delbert Gann (1878–1955), the most mythologised market astrologer of the American twentieth century (whose legend we weigh in Astrology in the Markets).

Gann's most famous device is the Square of Nine. You begin with the number 1 at the centre of a grid and spiral the integers outward — 2, 3, 4 and on around — so that each loop closes on an odd square: the first ring ends at 9, the second at 25, the third at 49, the fourth at 81. Four rings out, you have a 9×9 grid of eighty-one cells, exactly the size of the chakra (GannZilla, Construction of the Square of Nine). And Gann read it the way the Jyotiṣis read the chakra: not cell by cell, but by lines radiating through the grid. Each full ring is one 360° cycle; the cardinal and diagonal spokes — 90°, 180°, 270°, 360° — mark the cells that "activate" a price or a date. Numbers lying on the same spoke, or square to one another, were Gann's support and resistance, his turning points.

Here is the Square of Nine, built the same way as the chakra above. Click a number — a "price" — and watch its hard angles light up, the cells 90° and 180° away that Gann read as the next support and resistance.

Reading a price off the wheel

The wheel is not just a picture; it is how Gann projected support and resistance. The key is that the Square of 9 encodes the square root of a price. One full 360° turn of the spiral adds exactly 2 to the square root — because the odd squares (1, 9, 25, 49, 81…) lie along a single diagonal, two apart in their roots. So a quarter-turn of 45° is +0.25 on the root, a 90° "square" is +0.5, and a 180° "opposition" is +1.0.

To read levels off a price, then: take its square root, step it up or down in units of 0.25, and square the result back. Take the NIFTY spot close of 23,161 on 10 June 2026 — the same sample date the chakra above uses for its planets. Its square root is about 152.19, and the cardinal (90°/180°/360°) and diagonal (45°/135°) angles fall where the wheel below marks them.

23,161 sits on the same spiral as the grid above — just far out at ring 152, where a literal square would need some twenty-three thousand cells and could never be drawn. So a real price is read off the Square of 9 as a wheel rather than a grid: one full turn of the wheel is one ring of the square (+2 on the root), and its cardinal spokes are the very same cross you saw light up on the lattice. The arithmetic is identical — only the scale has changed.

A Gann trader reads 23,237 / 23,313 / 23,466 overhead and 23,085 / 23,009 / 22,858 below as the levels to watch, with the cardinal 90°/180°/360° turns counting for more than the 45° diagonals — the same cardinal-over-diagonal hierarchy the chakra draws with front-versus-side vedha. (The spiral widget above runs the same arithmetic — click any cell and the readout gives its angles.) The identical wheel is run on dates too, and Gann looked for turns where a price level and a time level "square"; map its 360° onto the zodiac and a price's angle ties to a planetary longitude — which is precisely why this geometry is filed under astro trading, and precisely the hinge to the chakra.

One honesty note before the wonder sets in: this is deterministic geometry, not a proven edge. The recipe will spit out tidy-looking levels around any price you feed it — which is what makes it persuasive and what makes it untested. Whether 23,161 actually turns at 23,466 more often than at some random nearby round number is the base-rate question we return to below.

Set the two side by side and the rhyme is hard to unsee. Both are eighty-one-cell oriented squares. Both map a 360° cycle onto a flat grid. Both are read by lines of activation thrown through the lattice — Gann's angles, the chakra's vedha. Both even fold names or numbers into the same space the planets move through, so that a price level and a calendar date can be pierced as readily as a nakshatra.

It would be easy, and wrong, to spin a hidden lineage from this — to claim Gann learned the chakra on his rumoured travels to India. There is no historical evidence of any such link, and the honest reading is more interesting: two traditions, separated by eight centuries and an ocean, independently reached for the same shape when they tried to square the circle of the year. A 360° cycle is awkward to hold in the mind; a 9×9 square is not. Both cultures discretised the sky the same way because it is a good way — which tells us something about human pattern-making, and nothing whatever about whether the markets obey it.

The catch — and what the evidence actually says

The seduction of a tool like the chakra is that it always produces a reading. Drop today's planets on the grid and lines light up; some pierced syllable will match the name of some stock that moved. The technique can never come up empty, and a technique that can never be wrong has told you nothing.

This is why the only respectable question is the base-rate question: not "was Saturn piercing the market's nakshatra during the fall?" but "how often does Saturn pierce that nakshatra on days the market doesn't fall?" If the answer is "about as often," the piercing is decoration.

It would be too easy to stop at dismissal, because the serious scholarship on celestial influence over markets is not empty — it is small, real, and contested. Researchers have found a statistically detectable lunar effect: returns around the new moon have run modestly higher than around the full moon across decades of global indices (Dichev & Janes, Lunar Cycle Effects in Stock Returns, 2003; Yuan, Zheng & Zhu, Are Investors Moonstruck?, Journal of Empirical Finance 13:1, 2006). A separate line of work found that morning sunshine in the city of a stock exchange correlates with marginally higher returns (Hirshleifer & Shumway, Good Day Sunshine, Journal of Finance 58:3, 2003). The most credible reading of all of it is mundane: the Moon and the weather affect human mood, mood affects risk appetite, and risk appetite nudges prices — a few basis points, swamped by noise, hard to trade. The sky may touch the tape, but through the soft channel of psychology, not through a piercing line on a grid.

So the chakra deserves neither reverence nor reflexive contempt. It deserves measurement.

How we would test it

This is the whole DaFinsTro method, and the chakra fits it cleanly. Every claim the chakra makes is, in principle, a conditional probability: when planet P pierces nakshatra N, the market tends to do X. That is a hypothesis with a date range attached, and a date range is something we can test.

The recipe is the same one we already run on more than 320,000 astrological patterns against thirty-five years of Nifty data:

1. Encode each vedha as an event. For a given transiting planet and a given target — a nakshatra, a sign, or a name-syllable mapped to a sector — compute every historical window during which that vedha was active. These become event periods exactly like a retrograde or a transit in our existing pipeline.
2. Measure the return of the relevant index, sector or stock across each window, and tally the win rate — the fraction of occurrences that were positive — against the all-days base rate.
3. Run the statistics — Sharpe, Sortino, profit factor, a binomial p-value — so that a piercing which "works" has to clear the bar that any edge has to clear: better than chance, and better than the cost of trading it.

Done that way, the chakra stops being a story and becomes a column in a table. Most of its pierced configurations will, we fully expect, land at the base rate — common patterns that decorate good days and bad days alike. A few might not. The point of the exercise is precisely that we do not know in advance which, and we are unwilling to pretend otherwise. Turning the Sarvatobhadra Chakra's vedha into testable event types is work we have scoped but not yet completed; when the numbers exist, they will appear here, win rates and all — not as a verdict on a sacred diagram, but as one more honest measurement of the sky against the tape.

Further reading

• Astrology in the Markets: Gann, the Teji-Mandi Tradition, and Wall Street's Open Secret — Gann, the Square of Nine, and the legends that outran the evidence
• Jyotiṣa and the Market: The Classical Sources of Indian Financial Astrology — the Saṃhitā / Medinī branch and the Bṛhat Saṃhitā's price doctrine
• Data-Driven Financial Astrology: What It Means to Actually Test the Sky — the measurement method in full
• Browse every event we track in the Astro Knowledge Bank

References

• Agarwal, M. K. Sarvatobhadra Chakra and Astrological Predictions (ed. Chistabo, 2012). The source for the widget's exact cell layout — the 1–81 varga numbering — and the "Chart of Vedha" giving the front/right/left vedha of every nakshatra.
• Sarvatobhadra Chakra. Wikipedia. (Structure of the 81 vargas, the vedha rules, the across/fore/hind distinction, the Mānasāgarī outcome grading, and the textual sources — Mānasāgarī, Phaladīpikā via G. K. Ojha, Brahmayāmala.)
• Sarvatobhadra Cakra. Saptarishis Astrology. (On the chakra in the muhūrta and mundane tradition.)
• Varāhamihira. Bṛhat Saṃhitā (6th c. CE), Arghakāṇḍa ("Section on Prices") — trans. N. Chidambaram Iyer (1884); M. R. Bhat (Motilal Banarsidass, 1981). The source of the Indian price-forecasting tradition.
• GannZilla. Construction of the Square of Nine. gannzilla.com. (The 1→81 spiral, the 9×9 grid, and the 360°-per-ring reading.)
• Gann, W. D. The Tunnel Thru the Air (1927) and the Square of Nine method; see also William Delbert Gann.
• Dichev, I. D., & Janes, T. D. (2003). Lunar Cycle Effects in Stock Returns. SSRN 281665.
• Yuan, K., Zheng, L., & Zhu, Q. (2006). Are Investors Moonstruck? Lunar Phases and Stock Returns. Journal of Empirical Finance, 13(1). ScienceDirect.
• Hirshleifer, D., & Shumway, T. (2003). Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather. Journal of Finance, 58(3). JSTOR.