Retrograde at birth
Which of the five visible planets were moving backwards on the day you were born — computed, with the exact degree and the period it fell inside.
Birth time is not needed — no planet stations more than once a day, so the date alone settles it except within hours of a station, which the result flags.
How common is each one?
This is the context that makes a retrograde birth placement readable, and it is missing from every page that sells one. Mercury is retrograde about 19% of the time, so roughly one person in five was born under it — a fifth of everyone you know. Saturn is closer to a third, Jupiter about a quarter. Mars is the genuinely uncommon one at around 9%.
So “born during Mercury retrograde” is not a rare marking; it is a common one. If a reading treats it as a distinguishing feature, the reading is treating a fifth of the population as distinguished.
Why no birth time is needed
A planet stations at a single moment, and the two states either side of it last weeks. The only dates where the time of day matters are the station days themselves, and on those the daily-motion figure above will be close to zero — which is your signal to treat the result as borderline rather than settled.