If life has taught us anything, it’s plain stupidity to ignore warnings, no matter how wild and irrational they may seem to be. Julius Caesar ignored his, the Ides of March, and it cost him his life.

Now we’re getting another ominous March warning, this one from Henry Weingarten, manager of the Astrologers Fund, a 27-year-old New York-based private money management and advisory service that has made a number of super investment calls over the years.

A professional astrologer since 1967, Mr. Weingarten tells me “the market is in a dangerous state and will get increasingly dangerous in 2006.” One key reason he’s so glum is his contrary expectation of a “significant economic slowdown,” which he predicts will see GDP growth drop to below 2% in the next few months, maybe even turn negative, and possibly evolve into a recession.

As far as the stock market goes, we won’t have to wait too long to see how accurate, or inaccurate, he is with his latest forecast, since he predicts that the Dow, which closed Friday at 10,940, will break below 10,500 in the next 15 to 30 days and perhaps drop as much as another 300 to 400 points within this period. In other words, he’ll either look like a hero or a bum in pretty short order.

Mr. Weingarten, who bases his forecasts on fundamental, technical, and astrological factors, notes that the planetary readings are distinctly negative. For starters, a solar eclipse – an occurrence in which the sun, moon, and Earth line up – is coming April 8. It’s viewed by our astrological expert as a significant risk factor that frequently leads to shocks or the unexpected. Further, he points out, two difficult business planets, Jupiter and Saturn, will be in challenging positions to each other come December 17 and will remain that way through most of 2006.

You may well say it all sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo. Well, if you think this guy’s a loony and you view me in the same light for airing his seemingly radical views, think again. Praised by both Barron’s and USA Today, Mr. Weingarten boasts some remarkable calls. Chief among them: the crash of the Japanese stock market in the early 2000s, the collapse of the Nasdaq market in 2001, the rebounding American market in 2003, the 2003 war with Iraq (which he predicted in January 2001, the day, in fact, of President Bush’s inauguration), and frequent gold rallies.

Aside from his expectations of a sharp economic slowdown and his negative planetary tradings, Mr. Weingarten rattles off a number of other factors – all of which he sees as realities – to support his bleak outlook. They are:

* A slew of additional interest rate increases, with the Federal Funds rate – now at 2.5% – rising to 3.5%-4% in the summer.
* Declining earnings.
* Further weakness in the dollar.
* An upward Chinese valuation of its currency.
* An overheated housing market showing cracks.
* Growing inflation, with the government’s reported rate of just over 2% climbing to a “true inflation rate” of 3%-4% before year end.

On March 22, the next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, Mr. Weingarten looks for short-term rates to be boosted to 2.75%, an action he thinks could trigger a further slowing in the economy and the real estate market and, in turn, set off the stock plunge he expects.

Given his glum outlook, our star gazer contends the time is now for investors to decrease their risks by selling overpriced American stocks, such as Google (which he predicts will be cut in half by next year), investing in overseas markets like Japan and Canada, and buying some bear funds (those that sell short, a bet that stock prices will fall). He also favors writing call options and buying puts, also bets on falling stock prices.

Our market bear is also gung-ho on gold (now $435 an ounce), which he expects to hit $480 by the summer. Mr. Weingarten thinks gold should represent about 10% of an investor’s portfolio and sees the metal benefiting from a declining greenback, as a hedge against inflation and more affluence in China and India where they love to own gold. Among gold stocks, he likes Newmont Mining and American Barrick.

His parting thought: “I don’t believe everything is wonderful, and the sooner you sell, the less money you’ll lose.”