If the market were a galaxy, the blue‑giant indices would be the bright stars that everyone watches, their orbits the long‑term trends that pull everything else. The smaller planets—like tech or energy—would follow their own paths but still feel the gravity of the giants. Rogue planets are the unexpected events—geopolitical shifts, sudden policy changes, or a pandemic—that can throw a whole sector off its orbit. The first pattern you’d notice is that the system tends to settle into resonances: a few sectors often move together, like planets locked in a 2:3 mean‑motion resonance. Those lock‑ins can create predictable co‑movements that you can trade on. Second, the system is hierarchical. A small shift in a big star’s orbit—say a central bank rate change—will ripple out and affect the orbits of the planets, but the effect is dampened by the planets’ own momentum. That’s why a sudden earnings miss in a small company rarely breaks the market; the larger stars absorb most of the shock. Third, look for “chaotic zones” where the gravitational pull of a rogue planet is just right to destabilize a nearby orbit. That’s when volatility spikes: you’ll see high‑beta stocks or frontier markets wobble wildly for a period before settling into a new orbit. Finally, every galaxy has a dark matter halo—unknown forces like sentiment, liquidity constraints, or algorithmic trading. Those forces are invisible, but their pull is evident in the way the orbits precess slowly. You can gauge that by tracking mean reversion in spreads or changes in implied volatility. So, map the big stars, watch the resonances, spot the rogue planets and stay alert to the dark matter. That’s the pattern set for any market galaxy.

Sounds solid. Pull the sector ETFs or indices, convert their price series to daily log‑returns, then run a rolling correlation with a lag window—say 20 days. Look for a correlation spike near +0.7 that lasts for at least a month, that’s your 2:3 lock‑in. Add a volatility filter: if VIX or the sector’s own implied vol jumps more than 20% in that window, flag a risk. Then you can set a simple rule: go long the high‑correlation pair when the volatility filter passes, exit when the correlation drops or the vol spike hits. Keep the model light, tweak the window and threshold on backtest, and you’ll have a neat resonance trader.