As the over-cited gem of financial crash lore has it, the moment when JP Morgan started receiving stock tips from his shoe-shiner was when the old boy decided to duck out of the market. It worked out nicely for the moustachioed financier, though slightly less so for those forced to pawn their shoes to feed their families as the Depression struck home.

So what on earth are investors to do when analysts at respectable brokerage houses start telling their clients to heed the magical messages of astrology?

Because — and you’d be forgiven for missing this — it turns out that the entire collapse of the global credit and financial system was presaged by a mysterious lunar cycle. All the bankers had to do to save their bonuses was look up from their Taittinger, squint at the Moon, and they’d have seen this catastrophe coming.

As brokers at CLSA pointed out to clients, the panic lows plumbed by markets at the start of this week coincided perfectly with the 27th day of the seventh lunar cycle. Spookily, they continued, the same precise point in the moon’s meanderings marked the bottom of the crashes in 1857, 1907, 1929, 1987 and 1997. If JP Morgan’s boot-black unwittingly screamed “sell”, surely the moon (in its quiet, spherical way) is now screaming “buy”.

Desperate times evidently call for desperate measures, and stock brokers are having a particuarly tough time of it at the moment. Those that have miraculously kept their jobs are supposedly being paid to supply ideas fodder to the fund managers — their usual bread and butter consists of individual stock-picking and the big “thematic” stuff that allows them to peddle a basket of trades (commodities are going up, so buy mines!).

The trouble is that these markets present no logical argument for either stocks or themes. Everything is either hammered or gobbled. It may well be that on a long-term view, there is astonishing value in Chinese solar power plays, Indian generic drugmakers or Korean steel smelters, but who cares?

Deutsche Bank, in its ruthlessly Teutonic way, reflected this embarrassing dearth of logic in a note to clients entitled “Credit Strategy”. The analyst notes the cosmological chatter surrounding the lunar coincidence and points out “for completeness” that today is indeed a New Moon. “To be fair in these crazy times,” writes Jim Reid, “the Moon’s cycles could be as good a way as any of trying to assess the short-term direction of the market.”

Asia, of course, has a rich history of allowing superstition, folklore and other mumbo-jumbo to dictate market sentiment. A visitor to Hong Kong can be bored rigid with stories of how the Feng Shui of various buildings dictates the fortunes of the companies working inside them. Japanese brokers have attempted to build myths about Mount Fuji, various animals and even malevolent woodland spirits into their salesman’s patter.

If, as seems perfectly plausible, stocks take another mashing and the Moon’s behaviour has not definitively marked the bottom of the current financial meltdown, then the power of that old market myth could take a heavy reputational clobbering. It will be in good company: "$200 per barrel crude", "AAA-credit rated" and “boom without bust” to name but three.

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