The Knife and the Bull: Trading Nifty Futures Under Moon in Taurus

I found out about Moon in Taurus in Krittika long before I found out about Nifty futures.

Back then, I was just Poonam—the woman trying to be a good wife to Sahil, a halfway-present mother to eleven-year-old Lavya, and a not-so-accidental CEO of a growing real-estate company called Lavya Constructions.

The trading desk in my life came much later, squeezed between Texas nights and Indian mornings.

A Krittika Morning in Texas

My phone alarm vibrated at 9:30 p.m. Lufkin time.

To normal people in my neighborhood, that’s when you take the last scroll through Instagram and fall asleep.

For me, it’s pre-market.

The house was dark and quiet. Sahil was asleep, sprawled diagonally across the bed the way he always did when he knew I’d be “up with India.” Lavya had already surrendered to her dreams, hugging the giant stuffed unicorn we’d bought at Target.

I slipped out of bed, wrapped myself in my faded blue robe, and padded toward the small study we had turned into my trading room.

Three screens glowed softly on the desk.

There, taped to the side of the center monitor, was the printout that had changed my relationship with the market: a page titled in my own handwriting, thick blue ink:

Moon in Taurus – Krittika Nakshatra Days in sample: 68 Avg open → close: +0.19% Median move: +0.07% Win rate: 56% Interpretation: Moderately bullish but very reliable. Not explosive, but supported by more observations.Practical use: Steady long-bias combination.

I touched the corner of the paper like other people touch a small deity on their dashboard.

“Steady long-bias,” I whispered. “No madness today, Poonam. Just steady.”

On the left monitor, my astro calendar confirmed it: Moon exalted in Taurus, sitting in Krittika. In Mumbai it was early morning; in Lufkin, Monday night.

I inhaled deeply, letting the numbers sink in.

Sixty-eight days of data. Fifty-six percent win rate. Not a lottery ticket. Not fireworks. Just a slightly tilted coin, a small persistent edge—if I respected it.

Tonight, that edge belonged to me.

CEO by Day, Trader by Night

People sometimes ask me why I bother trading at all.

“You already run a successful company,” my cousins say over video calls from Pune. “Why sit in front of screens at night?”

It’s a logical question, but logic has never fully captured why the market hooks people. My answer is simple: Real estate is slow. The market is alive.

Lavya Constructions moves in quarters and years. We study land titles, negotiate with municipal authorities, design floor plans, chase permits. A building can take two years to rise, three to sell, five to fully pay off.

But when I open my trading terminal and look at Nifty futures, time compresses. One candle on my screen is five minutes of human hope and fear. I can see them fight right in front of me. That rhythm, that pulse, became my addiction.

And then I discovered that that pulse danced with the Moon.

Astrology was always there in my childhood like background music—a pandit choosing dates, my mother muttering about retrograde Mercury when the washing machine broke. I never took it seriously.

Until one day I looked at my trade journal, noticed some of my best days clustered oddly, and asked the question that every astro-trader asks sooner or later: “What was the Moon doing on those days?”

That curiosity turned into spreadsheets, which turned into backtests, which turned into a thick folder of days where the Moon sat in different signs and Nakshatras.

And that’s how I met Krittika.

The Knife and the Bull

Krittika is a cutting Nakshatra. A sharp blade, they say. It slices what is rotten, separates truth from illusion.

A knife and a bull—Krittika in Taurus. That’s how I always visualized it.

A small white bull—steady, stubborn—walking in a straight line, with a shining knife edged along its horns. Not here to charge wildly. Here to carve a path.

The data supported the image. On Taurus + Krittika days, Nifty didn’t usually explode like it does on fiery Ashwini or Pushya days. Instead it walked upward in a stubborn, grind-higher fashion.

On my spreadsheet, the average open-to-close move was only +0.19%. Not huge. The median move was even smaller, +0.07%. If you expected a rocket, you’d be disappointed.

But the win rate—56%—made me pay attention. More important, the distribution. The losing days were often small chops; the big disasters were rare. The stand-out winners tended to come from steady trend days, not gap-up traps.

Krittika in Taurus didn’t promise fortune. It promised reliability. And for someone who lived a life juggling late-night trades and early-morning school runs, reliability was sexy.

Pre-Market Ritual

I clicked open my Indian broker terminal and the familiar green-and-black interface greeted me from the other side of the world.

“Connection stable,” the small text on the corner confirmed.

On the right monitor, my astro sheet glowed.

• Moon sign: Taurus ✅

• Nakshatra: Krittika ✅

• Moon Avastha for the first hour of Indian trade: Kumar, young and energetic.

I sipped my coffee—too strong, as always. The air-conditioner hummed softly. Outside, somewhere in the pine trees that lined our street, an owl called.

My pre-market ritual had become a small ceremony.

1. Check Moon combination.

2. Re-read statistical note.

3. Write tonight’s bias in my trading journal.

4. Plan instruments and position size.

I opened my journal, a thick blue notebook with small printed photos of Lavya and Sahil taped randomly inside, like reminders of who all this risk was really for.

On the fresh page I wrote:

Date: 00 00 0000 Location: Mumbai India Market Index: Nifty Futures Moon: Taurus in Krittika, exalted Bias: Steady long-bias. Will look to buy dips in alignment with intraday structure. Avoid impulsive shorts. No hero trades. Cut losers fast (Krittika knife). Max loss for session: ₹75,000 Target range: ₹1,25,000 – ₹1,75,000 Reminder: This is one of 68 observed days, not a divine order. Respect stops.

My pen paused.

I thought of the first time I had ignored this line and paid for it. A Krittika day, three months ago, when I stubbornly refused to cut a losing Bank Nifty short because “the Moon will save me.”

The Moon did not save me. My stop would have.

Since then, I wrote the reminder in capital letters: This is not a divine order.

My life is already full of responsibilities. I can’t afford to add superstition to the list.

Astro is just a weather report. I still have to drive the car.

The Family Interruption

The door creaked open and Lavya’s small face peeked inside, hair in a messy bun, eyes half-closed. “Mumma, you’re trading again?”

Her voice was sleepy and a little accusing.

“Yes, baby,” I softened, “it’s Moon in Taurus night.”

“The bull one?” she asked, dragging herself toward my chair. She had heard me narrate these combinations so many times that they had turned into bedtime stories.

“Yes, the bull one. Steady bull. No madness today.” She leaned on my shoulder, looking at the glowing charts.

“Will you be rich tomorrow morning?”

I laughed. “That’s—” I caught myself. “That’s not the right question. Ask me: will you be disciplined tomorrow morning?”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. Will you be disciplined, Madam CEO Trader?”

“That’s better.” I kissed her forehead. “Now go back to sleep. Tomorrow we have your science project to finish.”

“Only if Moon allows,” she whispered dramatically, and ran away giggling.

The door closed. Silence returned, but now it carried the echo of her laugh.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m being a bad mother by staying awake while she dreams, glued to markets from a country nine-and-a-half hours ahead.

But then I remember the feeling of watching a building we constructed finally touch the sky. I remember the thrill in her eyes when she cut the ribbon at one of our completed sites in Pune. “Mumma built this,” she had whispered, eyes wide.

I want her to see me as a creator of many things—homes, trades, probabilities, and maybe, one day, a future where she doesn’t have to choose between stability and passion.

The Open

9:15 a.m. IST. 10:45 p.m. in Lufkin.

The opening bell rang invisibly somewhere on the other side of the planet.

Nifty futures ticked to life. At first: a small gap up. 0.12% above yesterday’s close.

“Normal,” I murmured. Krittika likes normal opens.

Candles started printing on my five-minute chart: a small bullish candle, followed by another, slightly longer. Volume was decent. No dramatic spikes. I flipped to my statistical sheet again.

Typical range:25th percentile ≈ −0.32%75th percentile ≈ +0.65%Min −2.13%, Max +4.91%

The numbers whispered boundaries to me: don’t expect a 3% trend unless something truly unusual happens. Respect the historical fence.

Price pulled back slightly toward the VWAP. On the one-minute chart, I saw a tiny rejection wick at the level I had marked earlier as pre-market support.

Steady bull. Buy dips. Let the knife cut what is weak.

I placed my first order:Long Nifty futures, two lots, at VWAP. Stop-loss 35 points below the low of the rejection candle. Target: previous day high for partial, day’s range extension for rest.

The order filled with a soft “ding.”

Immediately, my heart sped up. It always does, even after years of trading. That rush never fully disappears; it just becomes a quieter companion.

For a moment, I closed my eyes and visualized the small white bull again. Not charging. Just walking forward, tapping the earth with its hooves, knife-horns cutting through the morning mist.

“Walk, little bull,” I whispered.

The Knife’s First Cut

Markets rarely respect your most poetic imagery for long.

Ten minutes after my entry, a burst of selling hit the index. A large red candle sliced through my entry price and pressed close to my stop.

On the news window, a flash headline scrolled:“RBI Governor comments on inflation risks; rupee weakens.”

“Of course,” I muttered. “They always talk when I enter.”

My P&L showed a small unrealized loss.

The old Poonam—pre-Krittika, pre-data—would have panicked. “But it’s a bullish Moon day, why is it dropping?” she would whine inside her head, maybe shift the stop a bit lower, give the trade some “space,” and then watch in horror as a small loss turned into a deep cut.

The new Poonam remembered the other side of Krittika: the knife.

Today’s combination wasn’t “bullish no matter what.” It was “steady long-bias with a knife for cutting.”

If the structure broke, I must cut. That’s what the knife is for.

The next one-minute candle bounced just above my stop, leaving a long tail. Buyers pushed in, but weakly. The five-minute candle, however, held the higher low.

I compared the structure to my original plan. The support zone was still intact. Volume during the drop hadn’t exceeded opening volume. It looked like a shakeout, not a trend change.

I held, but I didn’t pray. I observed.

On the third candle, buyers stepped in more comfortably. Price clawed back above my entry, then hovered. That’s when my phone buzzed.

CEO Mode

The screen showed a WhatsApp call from India: Rajiv, my senior project manager in Pune.

I hesitated for a second. If I ignored it, my trader side would be happy. If I picked it up, the CEO side would be satisfied.

I answered.

“Rajiv, tell me it’s not about another broken pipe.”

“Ma’am, good evening—uh, good morning,” he corrected himself, confused by time zones.

“We have a small issue with the Lonavala project. The contractor is asking for an advance release. He says steel prices are likely to rise. If we delay, the budget…”

As he spoke, my eyes stayed glued to the Nifty chart. The trade was finally breathing, moving five, ten, fifteen points in my favor.

I placed the phone on speaker and muted my own microphone.

Multi-tasking between construction budgets and live trades is an art most people will never appreciate.

While Rajiv poured his heart out, I scribbled numbers on a notepad, both for him and for me:

• Nifty long entry: 22,415

• Stop: 22,380

• Current price: 22,430

• First target: 22,470

I listened to Rajiv’s worries about reinforcement bars and monsoon delays, then unmuted.

“Rajiv, release only half the requested advance. Link the remaining to concrete slab completion. Send me the revised terms on email. And please, no more phone calls between 9:15 and 12:00 IST unless a building is literally on fire.”

He chuckled. “Yes, Ma’am. Understood.”

I hung up, exhaled, and refocused fully on the chart.

The bull had listened. It was walking now.

Grind Higher

For the next hour, Nifty did exactly what my Krittika research had promised: it ground slowly upward.

Not a single dramatic candle. Just a gentle staircase of higher highs and higher lows. Volume remained steady, neither euphoric nor fearful.

On such days, the biggest enemy isn’t volatility. It’s boredom.

When candles are small and orderly, your mind starts craving action. “Maybe you should add more size,” it whispers. “This is easy money. Where is the thrill?”

But tonight, I had a secret ally: the 68-day data sample.

Every time impatience tried to seduce me, I looked at the printout.

The edge is not as explosive as #1–#3, but it’s supported by more observations.Treat Taurus + Krittika as a “steady long-bias” combination.

Steady. Steady. Steady.

I decided not to add size. Two lots were enough. Another rule from my journal: On grinding trend days, size feels deceptively safe. Don’t surrender to that illusion.

Around 11:35 p.m. Lufkin time, the index touched my first target. I booked partial profits—one lot closed, banked into realized P&L. The remaining lot, I trailed with a tighter stop.

Green numbers flickered on my screen, and a small warmth spread through my chest. Not greed. Just quiet satisfaction.

I checked my risk dashboard: even if the trailing stop hit now, the worst I could end with was a solid green day.

My shoulders relaxed.

Motherhood, Interrupted

The door creaked again.

This time it was Sahil.

His hair was messy, and he squinted against the screen light.

“Madam CEO, still awake?” he yawned, walking in.

“Madam Husband, still complaining?” I smiled without taking my eyes off the screen.

He sat on the small sofa behind me. “How’s the Moon treating you?”

“Like a respectable lady,” I said. “No drama. Just a polite little uptrend.”

He chuckled. “Good. Because tomorrow we have a parent-teacher meeting at 4 p.m. your time. You remember, right?”

Guilt pricked me. I had forgotten.

I scribbled it on a sticky note and stuck it to my monitor: PT Meeting – 4 p.m. – Be Human, Not Zombie.

“See?” he teased. “You need three monitors and still I’m your reminder app.”

“I chose you for your notification features,” I shot back.

He nodded toward the charts. “So, how much will the bull pay for our coffee tomorrow?”

I told him the current realized profit.

He whistled softly. “Nice. That’s almost the cost of one bathroom in Lonavala.”

We laughed. Only people in real estate would measure profits in bathroom units.

“Okay,” he said, standing up. “Don’t stay beyond 1 a.m. Your body isn’t in Taurus, you know.”

After he left, the room felt both warmer and lonelier. That’s the strange paradox of trading: you are surrounded by charts, data, global flows of money, and yet, it is one of the most intimate, solitary things a person can do.

The Test

The real test came in the last hour of the session.

By then, my long position had been in profit for nearly three hours. I had trailed my stop multiple times, locking in a decent chunk of green.

Around 12:10 a.m. Lufkin time, 11:30 a.m. in Mumbai, an unexpected wave of selling swept across the screen. A large red candle pushed Nifty down sharply, eating into the accumulated gains of the day.

It wasn’t enough to hit my stop, but it came uncomfortably close.

I felt my pulse quicken.

A chat window popped up in my trading group:“Is this the top?”“Looks like distribution to me.”“Shorting here with tight stop, risk-reward is great.”

I stared at their messages.

On normal days, I might have been tempted to join them. There’s a seductive thrill in catching a reversal, in being the smart contrarian.

But I looked at my Krittika sheet again.

The edge is not explosive, but reliable.Steady long-bias.

Reliable does not mean invincible. But tonight, reliability meant I should give the up-trend the benefit of the doubt until structure truly broke.

I studied the higher timeframe chart: on the fifteen-minute view, the selloff candle was sharp but still within the rising channel. The VWAP lay below price. The previous swing low had not been violated.

It looked like a shake-out after a slow grind, not like a complete change of character.

Still, doubt gnawed at me.

I closed my eyes and imagined the bull again, knife on its horns.

At that moment, I realized something: the knife was not just for cutting losses. It was also for cutting the noise—people’s opinions, group chats, sensational headlines.

I turned off the trading group window.

“If my stop hits, it hits,” I told myself.

Another candle printed. A small doji, volume slightly lower.

Then, slowly, the next candle turned green. Buyers stepped back in, not frantically, just with quiet confidence.

Price moved away from my stop, reclaimed the previous intraday high, and then, almost lazily, pushed into a fresh high.

My P&L ticked upward. The bull had decided to keep walking. I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.

The Exit

By 1:10 a.m., the session was almost over.

Nifty had climbed roughly 0.65% from opening levels—ironically, right around the 75th percentile range my statistics predicted.

I could hold until the closing bell, but my eyelids were getting heavy. Tomorrow, I reminded myself, I had to be awake, human, and articulate for a parent-teacher meeting, then a Zoom review with my architects, then a site progress call.

Money is important, but not more than my ability to show up as a decent mother and CEO.

I clicked “Exit All.”

The order executed. My open P&L flattened to zero; realized P&L stood solidly green.

For a few seconds, I watched the candles continue without me. It’s always a slightly strange sensation: the market keeps breathing after you’ve disconnected the oxygen tank.

I closed the trading terminal, took a photo of my journal page with final numbers scribbled in, and saved it into my trade log folder.

Session summary:

• Net result: +₹1,48,000

• Max heat on open position: −₹30,000

• Largest unrealized drawdown: once, during mid-session selloff.

• Rule adherence: 9.5/10 (one moment of temptation to short, resisted).

• Emotional state: start: focused; middle: slightly anxious; end: calm, satisfied, sleepy.

• Astro note: Taurus + Krittika behaved exactly like the stats: slow grind up, one sharp but contained selloff, no wild gap reversals.

I wrote one more line at the bottom of the page:

“Be like Taurus + Krittika in life too: moderately bullish, very reliable.”

The Morning After

I woke up four hours later to the smell of coffee and the sound of clattering dishes.

Sahil was in the kitchen, making breakfast. The Texas sunlight streamed in through the blinds.

“You look less like a zombie today,” he said approvingly. “I’m guessing the Moon treated you well.”

“Very well,” I smiled, pulling up the P&L app on my phone to show him.

He nodded. “Nice. Remember, this is still money from the same brain that has to attend the parent-teacher meeting. Don’t spend it all on option premiums tonight.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “Today, I’m just a mother and a CEO.”

Lavya walked in, rubbing her eyes.

“Mumma, did the bull behave?” she asked.

“It did.” I lifted her onto a chair. “We rode it nicely.”

“Then can I get that new telescope I wanted?” she asked cunningly.

I laughed. “Already linking my trades to your wish list? That’s some advanced psychology, young lady.”

She grinned. “If Moon helps you, you should help Moon’s fan club.”

It struck me how normal this sounded in our house—Moon, trades, telescopes, real estate sites, Texas mornings, Indian afternoons. This messy combination was our life.

After breakfast, I logged into my work email. A fresh message from Rajiv awaited me: revised contractor terms attached, as promised. Another from our architect in Bangalore, with new renderings for a project we were exploring.

I switched gears, from charts to concrete, from five-minute candles to five-year project timelines.

But in the corner of my mind, a small part of me still whispered: Taurus + Krittika: reliable drift up.

That mood stayed with me all day.

The Parent-Teacher Meeting

At 4 p.m., we logged into the video call with Lavya’s teacher.

I forced myself to be fully present—no screens, no charts, no sneaky checks of the Nifty closing.

The teacher praised Lavya’s curiosity in science but mentioned she sometimes got “lost in her own world” during math lessons.

“She tells me, ‘Ma’am, numbers have energies,’” the teacher said kindly. “She says her mother trades using Moon cycles.”

I almost choked.

Sahil laughed. “That’s classified family information, Ma’am.”

After the meeting, I sat with Lavya on the couch.

“So,” I said, “numbers do have energies. But you must still respect basic math. You can’t tell the teacher that two plus two is five because Jupiter told you.”

She shrugged. “But in your trading spreadsheet things aren’t always equal. Sometimes you say the Moon increases the probability only a little, like plus zero point nineteen. So it’s not, like, straight math.”

I stared at her, surprised.

“That’s… actually very accurate,” I admitted. “Still, basics first. You master their simple math, then I’ll teach you my complicated math.”

She nodded, appeased.

As she walked away, I realized something that made me smile:

My daughter might grow up understanding that the world is not just random chaos; that hidden rhythms and probabilities shape life; that we can study them, respect them, and dance with them—but never fully control them.

Maybe that’s not a bad inheritance.

Night Reflection

That evening, after the calls and emails and one stubborn contractor argument, I finally sat down with my journal again.

Outside, the Texas sky glowed orange and pink.

I flipped back to last night’s page and traced the lines with my finger.

A question floated into my mind, the same one I had when I first started this journey:

Why am I doing all this?

Not just trading. Not just astro. The entire juggling act—being a wife, mother, CEO, trader, astrologer of candles.

Is it greed? Some days, partially. Money makes life easier. That’s undeniable.

Is it ego? A little. There is a selfish pleasure in saying, “I pulled money out of the market from a town in Texas while my city in India slept.”

But beneath all that, there is something softer and more stubborn, like Taurus itself: a desire for independence.

I don’t want to depend solely on real estate cycles, political policies, bank loan rates. I want a second set of wings.

I want to teach Lavya that her mother built not just buildings, but also mental models; that she read the sky and the screens and carved her own path.

I wrote in my journal:

“Moon in Taurus in Krittika is how I want my life to feel:Not explosive. Not fragile. Just steadily biased toward growth, supported by many observations, with a sharp internal knife to cut what doesn’t serve me.”

The knife is for cutting losing trades, yes. But also for cutting self-doubt, unnecessary guilt, and the voices—internal and external—that say, “Why are you doing something so unusual?”

I closed the journal.

Another Krittika Will Come

Krittika days come and go. Some will be winners, some losers, most somewhere in between.

It’s comforting to know there are 68 of them in my dataset so far, and more to be added. The Moon will keep circling the sky long after Nifty has been replaced by some future index with a different name.

I won’t be awake for all of them. Some nights I’ll choose sleep. Some mornings I’ll choose site visits instead of trade reviews.

But every time Moon enters Taurus again, and the astro software quietly prints Krittika on my screen, I’ll remember this particular day:

The grind higher. The half-asleep daughter at my door. The contractor wanting advances. The last-hour selloff. The decision to trust my rules instead of the group chat. The parent-teacher meeting where my trading style leaked into school gossip. The Netflix night on the couch that followed—with me, Sahil, and Lavya all under one Texas roof, while my money worked quietly in an Indian account.

When I think back to it, it doesn’t feel like a story about candles and percentages. It feels like a story about a woman learning to live in many worlds at once:

• Texas and India.

• Real estate and markets.

• Astrology and spreadsheets.

• Motherhood and ambition.

• Bulls and knives.

Moon in Taurus in Krittika taught me that you don’t need fireworks to change your life. Sometimes you just need a small, consistent edge—and the courage to use the knife when necessary.

The rest is just walking, one reliable step at a time.