BERLIN, Feb 12 An Indian astrologer is gaining prominence in Germany after successfully predicting last year's euro appreciation and a December peak in the price of gold.
Pandit Raj Kumar Sharma, 40, from Bombay, has a monthly advice column in financial magazine "DM-Euro" and has appeared on national television.
In this month's issue of the magazine he predicts the U.S. dollar will fall by 15-20 per cent by March.
A journalist at DM-Euro, Hans-Peter Canibol, described his pronouncements as "completely amazing".
"We were particularly surprised by his predictions the euro would rise last summer. He was dead right. His predictions on the German and U.S. stock exchanges have also been remarkably accurate," said Canibol.
Sharma describes himself as an "astro-numerologist" and works with a unique system based on the movements of the planets and their moons.
He inherited the method from his uncle and refused to divulge details in a telephone interview with Reuters. "A secret technique is involved. Only those dear to us can be initiated into what I do."
He decided to come to Germany because of the affinity he perceived there with his homeland, where he says he advises dozens of stockbrokers.
"Germans are more like Indians than anyone else in the world. They have all the elements to understand what astrology is about," Sharma said in a telephone interview.
He has his own website, www.solutionastrology.com. Last autumn, he predicted the gold price would hit record highs in December. Gold duly obliged, reaching a six-year high of $346.00/346.75 on December 19.
Gold has gone on rising since amid fears of an Iraq war.
Sharma predicts that there will be an Iraq war and that it will end on February 22. He is also "100 per cent sure" Democrat Al Gore, who narrowly lost to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election, will be the next U.S. president.
DM-Euro's Canibol said: "Given his record, we can't wait to see if he's right about Iraq - time will tell. But even he gets the odd thing wrong".
Indeed, last autumn Sharma appeared on SAT1 national television to advise Germany's entrant to the 2002 Miss World contest, Simone Wolf-Reinfurt, on what to wear.
But he failed to foresee that she would not even attend the the contest because of a stomach virus.
Sharma is phlegmatic about this. "Human beings are fallible: we all make mistakes."
Germans are no strangers to unorthodox prediction methods.
A blind German psychic, Ulf Buck, who claims to be able to read people's futures by feeling their naked buttocks.

Reported by Dave Graham, Reuters