Martin Armstrong Discussion

[AnonymousCoder]

Interesting that on the same day of my post where I covered this relativity MA answers a user question Reversals & Timing which clearly shows that Weekly Reversals are not valid standalone, but subject to the human interpretation of both weekly and daily forecast arrays which may negate the Reversal to mean the opposite or limit the validity to one day only. This in addition to the 1% rule and the not so rare superposition event. This reduces the confidence with what they can be traded to zero. I am just considering what seems to be the consensus in this group that the forecast arrays are much too ambiguous to be considered reliable. Here it is set in stone that they are strictly part of the Reversal system.

Here is the critical question to answer:

This is a computer based system, right? Using AI and so forth? Bullshit.

Someone please tell me that a computer cannot figure out these conditions and come up with a clear answer that the poor user has to find by navigating this maze? Give me a break! This is disgusting. Only people who want to be deceived, want to be lied to will believe this. Either MA does not know how to write computer programs, or he knows it is not possible and keeps beating around the bush. I said it before. The more time you try learning this stuff, the more time you spend losing money. The result is the same that his system does not work.

In other words, the forecast arrays will mostly not agree with the Reversals. So when the Reversals are good and you trade them, then you ignore the forecast arrays, fine. If you however take them seriously, then you do not trade and lose an opportunity. On the other hand, if the Reversals are bad, then it is your fault if you ignored the forecast arrays. Pick your poison.

What was the timeframe you used to determine if the daily/weekly/monthly elected reversal was a failure?

Very simple. For daily I compared the next day close with the current day close. For weekly I compared the next week end close with the elected end of week close. For monthly I applied one month. If the 1% rule applied, and / or if there was a superposition event, then I assumed a trade in the opposite direction. This would normally give more favorable results. I know that this could be negated by Armstrong's instructions that I wrote about in my previous post, but there is no way to do this in a systematic fashion - it is chaos. I actually aborted weekly reversal trades, according to Armstrong rules - chaos. This effectively converts weekly reversals into daily reversals so to speak, defeating their purpose. Result? Sharply reduced profits / losses. It is more like not trading, losing opportunities. So I decided to stick with a simple reproducible scheme which is a kind of an average, the most objective way from my perspective. Otherwise it cannot be systematic. Last not least, new reversals are elected on a weekly cycle every week, so one has to keep in step with that. That is perhaps the strongest argument for trading them like that. Same for daily. New reversals are elected every day, often in opposite directions. So I cannot evaluate them for longer than their respective period. I have accumulated a very large number of reversals over the years, and I have to say that volume is really necessary for this evaluation. For example, there are weeks where the stock market rallies and Socrates elects bullish reversals. If it is lucky, then there are a number of good reversals this week because a large number of symbols that were available to me are correlated with the stock market, perhaps even Crude Oil, making this a good week. Then the next week it is the opposite, all bad. I found that the monthly reversals are just as terrible as the daily ones. The biggest problem is that with a number of symbols to choose from, Socrates will not tell you which one to trade. MA and his staff always cherry pick the successful recent ones after the fact and say: See, what an amazing system. Nobody talks about the other 50% - the bad signals and trades.

Socrates should provide historical dumps of past elected reversals so everybody can assess past performance like I did. Honestly, doing this is a full time job. Other financial services keep a record of good and bad trades, such as etfguide.com. Not doing this is dishonest. If other manual services can provide this, an automated system like Socrates can provide it with much less effort. There is really no excuse.


Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

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[DanB1]

I have read so many pages of this and other blogs over the weekend and came to 1 conclusion, I fell for the oldest scam in the world: somebody claiming to be able to predict the future and stupid me paying him for this information.
I went over all my trades in the last months and now (thanks to all your posts) with a more critical look, I can say that Socrates has not contributed much, if any at all.
There were trades where I used Socrates that were successful and made me a profit. But using the exact same set-up (reversal+array) the next trade would make a loss.

I also believe that OR Martin Armstrong is a terrible teacher who can not explain his own creation, OR his creation does not work well and you only end up with mediocre results.
But if it does work, why not show it once and for all and post a series of trades in a video, do it live, put it online and this whole blog of 274 pages is useless and all his critics will clear off with their tail between their legs.
But MA will never do that because he can't.

For a long time I thought it was me, not smart enough to understand this system. But WTF, I'm 40yrs old and financially independent due to my trades/investing in the past.
I really want to thank MA_talk, Trulycoined and others. Thanks guys, you made me open my eyes!

[Snillegutt]

The sad thing is that MA always talks about corruption, but in the end, he himself is just as corrupt as his declared “enemies”. Any honest man will look for fails in his system, so that he can adjust those fails and make a better system.

Any honest engineer, philosopher, politician, pedagog, any honest person in any profession will always try to correct and make better. When MA does not speak openly on his blog on all the counseling from Socrates that do NOT work or explain why, or something – it is simply because he had a taste of fame and wants to keep it, even if its built on sand.

Honesty is a rare quality.

[trulycoined]

I only ramped up my BS litmus test efforts where I was considering the Rome WEC. What MA talks about is VERY seductive. Especially the doom and gloom prophecies where you then feel "empowered" to know about this, escaping the proverbial tidal wave, while everyone else who wasn't as "enlightened" drowns.

MA's philosophy is almost cult-like where, as is typical with this story that feeds on some of the many psychological flaws in human behaviour, there is a big story of impending Armageddon and even the most intelligent and sceptical get swept up in the ecstasy of it all, sacrificing things or themselves so fervent are their beliefs in the "leader" and his prophecies.

Already increasing in scepticism having attended the Orlando WEC in 2018 (which was actually one of the reasons for attending as absurd as that sounds), the more I scrutinised MA, the more his story/model fell to pieces. The Socrates subscription was just an exercise in burning cash. It contains nothing of value or any advice that's tradeable. It has a map of "capital flows" and yet no explanation of how AE has access to such information (if it even exists). The private blog also contains content that isn't much different to any other analyst.

Financial reports/charts and trackers can be had for a similar price on Morningstar, which has a superior depth of information.

My theory for MA is he uses Socrates as the carrot to push his reports and events. Socrates is what drives excitement and intrigue, so making selling reports and event tickets easier. It's no different than those snake oil ads you see on FB where a "guru" FX trader, digital marketer or life coach offers a free book of "secrets" for a hugely discounted price with a promise of riches to come. Once you have committed to that, it then makes it infinitely easier to sell what they wanted to sell you in the first place - and that product is always 10-20x the cost of the original commitment - and is always about improving your today for a better life tomorrow. No different to MA's narrative.

This is predictable human behaviour in action, which I think is at the very core of MA's modus operandi. I actually think he has a better understanding of human nature than he does of economics, which is partly why he has been so successful in pushing his consulting products for the past 30-40 years. As soon as the SEC banned him from institutional investors - and/or his credibility was shot - the next most obvious target was retail investors, and here we are...

I have always felt that the ECM is simply an indicator of human nature. Since human nature is predictable, like the tide, you can predict that it will come in and then go out, before coming back in again. At a macro level it makes it easier to predict. Example would be a bank run if say a major bank in a Western country went bust. Then it's timing, and that too can be guessed correctly some of the time. This might explain why MA gets some calls correct, while being wrong on others. His website is purposefully badly designed, making it very difficult to find old articles where he made incorrect predictions.

On this note, not that I know much at all about bitcoin, here is another predictable outcome: when the next major banking crisis hits, the price of bitcoin will rocket. Soon after, those in the know who can hack exchanges who are also anticipating this, will execute a massive hack and steal a huge sum of newly invested money.

The above requires no AI, just an understanding of typical human behaviour and the motivators behind that behaviour.

A lot of the concepts MA covers are not new. Many other writers, philosophers and economists have written about similar things long before MA got bored working for gov and decided to become a consultant to the financial world.

I also wonder if MA, having spent a lifetime pushing the ECM, has found it no longer works (if it ever did) or whatever data he had access to pre-jail time is no longer available to ensure more accurate forecasts. Destitute, and with a heavy dose of confirmation bias, he is continuing to push the "Forecaster" narrative, even though it is basically all guess work, or a big game of truth, truth, BS - knowing it sells expensive reports and events to a retail audience desperate for an explanation to the bizarre suicide of Western Civilisation. And that is the end game here.

If he hears of only 1/100 successes from his readers or clients based on Socrates/his predictions, that only further fuels the confirmation bias and so he continues with his "forecaster" narrative, while never scrutinising the ECM, where every model of any complex system requires continued testing and optimisation to maintain accuracy. He also fools himself into thinking he is doing nothing wrong by preaching nonsense to his followers.

MA is an interesting person for an alternative economic outlook, which I believe will happen, such as the end of Western Civilisation. Whether that will be in 2032, we will see. I wonder if it might come to pass with barely a whimper like a lot of his other predictions. However, using his ECM or Socrates to trade - it holds no value otherwise there would solid evidence, of which none exists.

[AnonymousCoder]

What is this Socrates system then and where does it fit in your trading activities?

Reversals, Forecast Arrays, indicators such as resistance, support, moving averages, momentum, energy and signals such as "False reaction on this level", and the pattern recognition in the Global Market Watch are all the same thing. They are different representations or views of the same historical data in a SINGLE dimension.

This single dimension is only the price, the single time series of the price of the symbol that it looks at. On the other hand, without all this, YOU can see everything of it in a chart representing this time series, perhaps in multiple time frames. A single data series, a single dimension.

So when you are trying to use that system to identify a turning point, or derive any other critical trading decision, then you are asking that the combination of views as described above, views of a single dimension of the whole trading universe, will give you that answer. And Martin Armstrong is doing EVERYTHING he can possibly do to maintain that illusion in you so you get into a deep dependency on that single dimensional system, hoping that some magic in it will actually achieve your trading objectives.

The irony is that you need to pay extra money for every additional symbol you want to explore, still in a single dimension.

Now say if you don't have Socrates, you are spending more time exploring the universe around that symbol you are going to trade. You spend more time reading news, you spend more time learning about other markets to watch that may have an influence on the price development of your symbol. You are actually learning more about how to trade. You are moving far beyond what Socrates can see because it ever only looks at a single time series.

I recently thought that I would want to use Socrates to expand my horizon by using the capital flow heat map as a bird's eye view before drilling down. As I pointed out in a previous post, I found that it is broken because it has daily, weekly and monthly time frames mixed up. When I asked Socrates support, I was told that it isn't meant to be used for trading.

You as a trader, can handle 100 times more complexity than what this stupid system can do. It is basically 30 years behind.

Or, have you ever seen in any of its reports, that the current symbol behavior is described in relation to, say for simplicity, the $DXY US Dollar index or any other currency?

This system is so simple, that due to its simplicity, it can handle any number of symbols because it handles them all in isolation, in a single dimension.


Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

[DanB1]

You are right, there is never any mention of, for instance, the USD in other reports. Although there is a big inverse correlation between the USD and Gold but I've never seen that it gets mentioned.

Speaking about reports, I bought the "2018 year end"report for $750. You would say that, as we are now halfway into the year, some of it must have been manifested...
Regarding the DJI it mentioned that if we close in 2018 under the 2017 closing of 24,719.22 this would be a warning that the market is entering 2019 weak.
So 2018 closed on 23,062.40 but from January the market went up up up, reaching ~26,696 in April.
So not only did Socrates missed the move, it thought that 2019 would start weak.
It's the same for other indices as well. The report is extremely bearish on the DAX, targeting it at 9,300. This could still happen, but so far it's up ~15% YTD (in €), at ~12,155.

We also have to bear in mind that in January 2019 we had the biggest ever short position in the SPX (CFTC Non-Commercial)
Short positions are hugely important and going long when the whole market is long, or short when the whole market is short is never a good idea.
But I don't think Socrates includes short/long positions. At least, I've never seen it.

[AnonymousCoder]

There is another interesting one:

The GMW combined with Reversals. I was getting interested in How Can Socrates Forecast The Biogen Crash Today?.

I wrote a scan that matches the BIIB pattern at the time. Typical single dimension type of thing, but perfect match. Just a few days ago, that scan found Tableau Software NASDAQ:DATA. If it was in Socrates, it would have been flagged the same, including the Bearish Reversal. It really has the same pattern. The declining downtrend line, the sharpening wave, the high close. But Socrates does not know the difference between Biotechnology and Software Development. See what happened


Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

[rosousa]

Who forecast that the Yield on 10-Year Treasury note would fall bellow 2.5% this year? Martin? NO Socrates? NO
Not a single market forecaster/analyst respondent in January´s Wall Street Journal survey of economists predicted that:
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1138184175201193984

You know who called the timing of the last recessions? Nobody. Not the Fed, not economists. Why? Because nobody knows. Confidence and cycles are very tricky things. In case of the Fed I would go further and say that, even if they knew, which they don't, they wouldn't tell anybody!

Now back to primary reason you using Socrates/MA forecasts as investment/trading tool. Do you know what is the forecasts hit rate of MA in last 4 years? No more than 30%, so clearly you have negative expectation of using it as a trading/investing tool.

I will not comment on forecast accuracy of Socrates as it don´t forecast anything, is just a software created +30 years on MS-DOS disaster code & full of bugs but back then that created one of the 1st financial markets historic database of prices and some few technical indicators, on the time that most of the exchanges floor traders markets resources were made by pen+paper. Cutting-edge breaking 30 years ago, underdog nowadays to any current available technical/financial software available on the market.  

If you believe that GOD, super-computer or any person on earth could reach a hit Rate forecasting financial markets of +80%, why do you think he/she will give it away for free on his blog or sell that information instead of leverage their own capital with huge debt and put their own $ on that very accurate forecasts?

Over last 4 years, a small group of high skilled/experienced persons on different areas from Trading, risk management, software engineers, code writers, we have back-test +90% market approaches, theories, strategies including reversals, cycles, Elliot waves, fibonacci, Gann, Pii cycles and all kind of technical analysis tools (which all are basically derivation of the same thing - price, volume and cycles/seasonal information, which is the main information available on all markets). The main conclusion we had reached is that as we try to build a system that reach 70-80% winning trades, the profit of system would drop exponential as the number of trades/year would be reduced exponential and lot of confirmations needed to +70% win rate on trades bring up exponential rise in price risk (the % risk that you have to take or simply speaking the risk/reward ratio will be too high and getting exponential worst as the systems approach +75% winning trades). So, with that in mind, the Win Rate of system isn´t a good measure of their performance, risk/reward ratio or profit factor is much more useful.

I have attended 2 WEC´s already and wasted lot of hours reading MA blog posts and I never ear/read in  
it the profit factor/ risk/reward ratio of any back-test in any instrument in Socrates, but read/ear several claims that Socrates never wrong, he´s always right which is nonsense to anyone with a basic understanding that financial markets are the most competitive markets in the world, so even the best traders/investors edge is very small and of course very far from 100%.

We have to give, merit to MA in one thing. He´s a hell of a salesmen/marketeer! He´s the only person in the world that can Sell a market history review class (WEC conferences) for $2750 or having people paying minimum +$2000/year to beta test 1 instrument/market access in the Socrates database/ black box system. He have top-notch charisma, when you´re close to him and ear him speaking you completely forget that what he´s saying can´t be real, isn´t possible on earth a system/super-computer that is always right or anything close to it.

RS  
https://twitter.com/ricardosousaIA

  

[olegrey]

@rosousa  ECM Slack Groups ? I would be interested to join.

+1

2 of them are private groups but ECM-Traders slack group I can send invitations to anyone who wants to join, just send me your email in a pvt message and you will receive a Slack invitation to join ECM-Traders.

Rosousa, pvt message sent

[MA_talk]

I have read so many pages of this and other blogs over the weekend and came to 1 conclusion, I fell for the oldest scam in the world: somebody claiming to be able to predict the future and stupid me paying him for this information.
I went over all my trades in the last months and now (thanks to all your posts) with a more critical look, I can say that Socrates has not contributed much, if any at all.
There were trades where I used Socrates that were successful and made me a profit. But using the exact same set-up (reversal+array) the next trade would make a loss.

I also believe that OR Martin Armstrong is a terrible teacher who can not explain his own creation, OR his creation does not work well and you only end up with mediocre results.
But if it does work, why not show it once and for all and post a series of trades in a video, do it live, put it online and this whole blog of 274 pages is useless and all his critics will clear off with their tail between their legs.
But MA will never do that because he can't.

For a long time I thought it was me, not smart enough to understand this system. But WTF, I'm 40yrs old and financially independent due to my trades/investing in the past.
I really want to thank MA_talk, Trulycoined and others. Thanks guys, you made me open my eyes!

DanB1, I was exactly just like you, if not more.

Even when I'm far familiar with Artificial Intelligence than average people, knowing that it is indeed possible to create such system (given sufficient ACCURATE data and computational power), I still fell for Armstrong's scam.

And it just takes anybody to look at what Armstrong provides OBJECTIVELY without any confirmation bias to figure out the truth.

Of course, part of the problem is that we always think that there is more information lacking because we didn't pay subscription, or didn't pay the Pro level, or didn't buy the specific report, or didn't attend WEC conferences, and thought that we are not evaluating him with complete information.

But it is here on this forum, where we all gather to contribute information, blog/internet search, and trading experiences with Armstrong's Socrates, and figure out jointly that

Martin Armstrong in all likelihood is just a BIG SCAM that provides ZERO useful/profitable trading information (short nor long term).

Sure, I don't deny that some of his views and predictions (taking out of context based on his timeframe) are correct or may eventually come true.

However, a human doesn't really live to 100 years to verify some of his claims..  If the western civilization collapses 500 years from now instead of 2032/2033, I'm telling you that trading/investing based on that "2032 knowledge" will almost certainly make you POOR.

In a way, all predictions, even the most non-sensible ones, could come true, if given long enough time-frame.  But it is exactly the CORRECT timing that will make you RICH, well, assuming that you know that before it happens.

And definitely Martin Armstrong is NOT giving anybody the right timing.



Honestly, I wish somebody has told me all these 10+ years ago, so that I wouldn't need to suffer all the unnecessary trading losses due to Armstrong.  And I'm here posting (and made http://armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com/), so that another fellow trader/investor won't regret believing in Armstrong's BS, 10 years from now.

[MA_talk]

Who forecast that the Yield on 10-Year Treasury note would fall bellow 2.5% this year? Martin? NO Socrates? NO
Not a single market forecaster/analyst respondent in January´s Wall Street Journal survey of economists predicted that:
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1138184175201193984

....
Over last 4 years, a small group of high skilled/experienced persons on different areas from Trading, risk management, software engineers, code writers, we have back-test +90% market approaches, theories, strategies including reversals, cycles, Elliot waves, fibonacci, Gann, Pii cycles and all kind of technical analysis tools (which all are basically derivation of the same thing - price, volume and cycles/seasonal information, which is the main information available on all markets). The main conclusion we had reached is that as we try to build a system that reach 70-80% winning trades, the profit of system would drop exponential as the number of trades/year would be reduced exponential and lot of confirmations needed to +70% win rate on trades bring up exponential rise in price risk (the % risk that you have to take or simply speaking the risk/reward ratio will be too high and getting exponential worst as the systems approach +75% winning trades). So, with that in mind, the Win Rate of system isn´t a good measure of their performance, risk/reward ratio or profit factor is much more useful.

I have attended 2 WEC´s already and wasted lot of hours reading MA blog posts and I never ear/read in  
it the profit factor/ risk/reward ratio of any back-test in any instrument in Socrates, but read/ear several claims that Socrates never wrong, he´s always right which is nonsense to anyone with a basic understanding that financial markets are the most competitive markets in the world, so even the best traders/investors edge is very small and of course very far from 100%.

We have to give, merit to MA in one thing. He´s a hell of a salesmen/marketeer! He´s the only person in the world that can Sell a market history review class (WEC conferences) for $2750 or having people paying minimum +$2000/year to beta test 1 instrument/market access in the Socrates database/ black box system. He have top-notch charisma, when you´re close to him and ear him speaking you completely forget that what he´s saying can´t be real, isn´t possible on earth a system/super-computer that is always right or anything close to it.

RS  
https://twitter.com/ricardosousaIA

THANK YOU for the information!!!

[AnonymousCoder]

What is the Global Market Watch (GMW)?

For Martin Armstrong's own description, please see Understanding the Global Market Watch

The technology behind it is old. The service was available publicly at no charge between 2013-11-01 and 2016-01-20 daily, and at the time, he promised that he would make it available at no charge indefinitely. It is now part of Socrates, where the daily and weekly time frames are missing from the Investor version. So it is not free any more.

While MA notes that one should not trade based on the GMW, I offer the following logic: If it has any value whatsoever, then for a particular pattern, there must be, statistically, something specific about this pattern, such as differences in price movement in the future between specific patterns. Why then otherwise use a pattern?

I wanted to know. I downloaded all pages for each market sector each day (over 4,000 in total). Then I parsed these pages and loaded them into a database. I think the total is about 100,000 records. The beauty is that with the GMW pages, previous and current price is recorded with the pattern, so I had not only the patterns but also the current and future prices.

Armed with this database and a powerful programming language, I cleaned up the data from outliers and other rubbish such as companies gone bankrupt and ran queries and built reports. I think I even used a trading calendar and built simple trading strategies at some point.

I sliced and diced the data (I found 600 different pattern combinations, where I discriminated even by the trend colors) in all directions. The result was, that regardless of how I did it, none of the patterns had any specific outcome statistically. All noise. There was an exception though. For rare patters, that occurred only 2 to 5 times, there was a somewhat clear outcome. There is a simple explanation for that, which comes from the way that MA builds the patterns.

Roughly, what he needs to do is as follows:

He needs to split the historical data looking back for a limited time into discrete value chunks, after smoothing etc.. Then each chunk combination gets converted into a unique key for look-up of a pattern in his pattern database. It is a technology similar to "Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX)". If a price movement after chunking is not found in the database, then the user will see the "New Pattern forming" message. After some time has passed, MA manually inspects the new patterns which now have some useful future price movements with them. Each new pattern is then labeled manually with a description such as "High close sharp drop coming" and uploaded into the database as he wrote here True AI and Fake Neural Net Forecasting Programs, and his AI computer which as he said "learns like a child" knows some new patterns from his observations.

The trick is as he uploads these patterns, they are still fresh and get used in the market which is still somewhat similar to a few days back, perhaps for other symbols, and they are self-fulfilling to some extent. After some time passes, the patterns are occurring more frequently, and this effect vanishes. There is likely to be another effect: Multiple patterns will have the the same description, and this will blur their effectiveness.

After all, this is again one-dimensional, manual, not the work of some AI computer. I am saying that the information is useless for me, because ANY future price movement is possible for any pattern with equal probability, and statistically that is what happens because I have measured it. The irony is that I am a pattern trader as classified by my broker. And in fact, I am trading based on patterns. But not based on GMW patterns, and not based on Reversals. Because while I would love to trade based on GMW patterns and Reversals, (otherwise why do all this research), as I wrote earlier, the stuff does not work and I have to develop my own methods.

So why do I think that patterns are still useful after all this experience? First I think that MA computer programming is of bad quality. I have seen too much of it in the form of bugs in his computer generated reports. Second, if I trade a defined pattern, that pattern is crisp and transparent. I know what the criteria of that pattern are. With a GMW pattern one knows only the description but not what it aims to match. With crisp defined patterns, I can apply them in a search of 40,000 market symbols. In comparison, Armstrong patterns are obscure and cannot be verified / trusted, an cannot be used to search. So I am saying that patterns are useful except Socrates patterns.

Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

[trulycoined]

I have read so many pages of this and other blogs over the weekend and came to 1 conclusion, I fell for the oldest scam in the world: somebody claiming to be able to predict the future and stupid me paying him for this information.
I went over all my trades in the last months and now (thanks to all your posts) with a more critical look, I can say that Socrates has not contributed much, if any at all.
There were trades where I used Socrates that were successful and made me a profit. But using the exact same set-up (reversal+array) the next trade would make a loss.

I also believe that OR Martin Armstrong is a terrible teacher who can not explain his own creation, OR his creation does not work well and you only end up with mediocre results.
But if it does work, why not show it once and for all and post a series of trades in a video, do it live, put it online and this whole blog of 274 pages is useless and all his critics will clear off with their tail between their legs.
But MA will never do that because he can't.

For a long time I thought it was me, not smart enough to understand this system. But WTF, I'm 40yrs old and financially independent due to my trades/investing in the past.
I really want to thank MA_talk, Trulycoined and others. Thanks guys, you made me open my eyes!

DanB1, I was exactly just like you, if not more.

Even when I'm far familiar with Artificial Intelligence than average people, knowing that it is indeed possible to create such system (given sufficient ACCURATE data and computational power), I still fell for Armstrong's scam.

And it just takes anybody to look at what Armstrong provides OBJECTIVELY without any confirmation bias to figure out the truth.

Of course, part of the problem is that we always think that there is more information lacking because we didn't pay subscription, or didn't pay the Pro level, or didn't buy the specific report, or didn't attend WEC conferences, and thought that we are not evaluating him with complete information.

But it is here on this forum, where we all gather to contribute information, blog/internet search, and trading experiences with Armstrong's Socrates, and figure out jointly that

Martin Armstrong in all likelihood is just a BIG SCAM that provides ZERO useful/profitable trading information (short nor long term).

Sure, I don't deny that some of his views and predictions (taking out of context based on his timeframe) are correct or may eventually come true.

However, a human doesn't really live to 100 years to verify some of his claims..  If the western civilization collapses 500 years from now instead of 2032/2033, I'm telling you that trading/investing based on that "2032 knowledge" will almost certainly make you POOR.

In a way, all predictions, even the most non-sensible ones, could come true, if given long enough time-frame.  But it is exactly the CORRECT timing that will make you RICH, well, assuming that you know that before it happens.

And definitely Martin Armstrong is NOT giving anybody the right timing.



Honestly, I wish somebody has told me all these 10+ years ago, so that I wouldn't need to suffer all the unnecessary trading losses due to Armstrong.  And I'm here posting (and made http://armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com/), so that another fellow trader/investor won't regret believing in Armstrong's BS, 10 years from now.

Ha! I was going to say feel free to reproduce some of my posts on your blog as there are also some valuable links, especially that Quora post where the author posts an image of MA's 2008 forecast that COMPLETELY missed the buying opportunity of the decade on Mar 2009, and instead predicted the reverse.

It's funny. Sometimes on FB I will click through one of those many "guru" ads selling product X that will turn anyone from rags to riches, with no experience necessary. It is for amusement only, where I am targeted since FB knows what industry I work in, which is the same industry these gurus claim to be "experts".

The pros (me) in that business vertical can smell the BS from a mile off, while those with little to no experience are lapping it up as gospel, handing over money. I despair, and know there will be a lot of people who will lose money chasing dragons, but then that is their problem and I'm not here to police the internet. Selling snake oil is as old as humankind.

It would seem MA is doing EXACTLY the same thing with inexperienced retail investors, where any professional/institutional trader, especially those with advanced computer trading systems, would smell the BS from a mile off and scoff at his nonsense. They too would be of the opinion that many (retail) investors will lose money chasing dragons, but such is life. It is not their job to police the internet, and yet that is exactly the vehicle MA uses to sell very expensive reports and events, which are then used to upsell subscriptions to Socrates.

And hands up, I did fall for it. This is also why you must be conscious of the flaws in the human psyche. Like how dogs are suckers for an animal bone, humans are suckers to a person in authority who claim they can part the ocean and lead you to the promised land...

p.s. I've enjoyed reading some of your posts on your new blog! Hopefully that will be another resource for MA followers to review his work more objectively, rather than believing the guy is the 21st Century answer to Einstein and no word of his can possibly be wrong.

[etoimene]

I hate to spoil a spitting party,
but how do you explain that yesterday EURUSD  turned within 5 pips of reversal and GBPUSD within 1 pip of reversal?

If some of you can give numbers that precise, my hat's off to you.

I still don't understand why it was these reversals and not some other, and why it was yesterday and not some other day, but that is too close to be coincidence.

BTW, it is not the first time I have seen this behavior.

[AnonymousCoder]

I hate to spoil a spitting party,
but how do you explain that yesterday EURUSD turned within 5 pips of reversal and GBPUSD within 1 pip of reversal?

If some of you can give numbers that precise, my hat's off to you.

I still don't understand why it was these reversals and not some other, and why it was yesterday and not some other day, but that is too close to be coincidence.

BTW, it is not the first time I have seen this behavior.

I have seen these near hits many times before, too. It is intriguing, but no surprise, given that reversals are created near resistance and support levels. It is still coincidence because the ranges are quite small, and the likelihood to hit a reversal is high. Naturally, these support and resistance levels is what traders focus on as well. Kind of self-fulfilling. However, this does not mean that one can use reversals to trade and beat the market. There is a correlation between all markets, and it is likely that if one market shows this behavior then others will do so, too. The currency pairs are actually the worst performers - you cannot make money using the weekly or any reversals. You get whip-sawed with no end in sight. That is because the currencies are typically not moving in one direction for long, and the reversals if elected are buy the high and sell the low or just break even for a week. No point getting mystified. Just do the math. Collect a few hundred reversals in a spreadsheet and you will see what I mean.
Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

[AnonymousCoder]

I hate to say this but there is flaw in judging the system by going through the blog. MA does of course know the weakness of the system. Before he posts a message on the blog, he will make a definite statement only in case where he has cherry-picked a case that he is most confident about, and where he has falsified past performance of the system where required. And still he fails. But we don't have this luxury. Those trades are so rare that it meets the criteria that rosousa has explained in detail with his risk / reward calculation in an earlier post that is worth reading. In simple terms, the system does not let you cherry-pick like that because there is no cherry-picker in it. And if you could in fact cherry-pick somehow, then you would only get three trades in a year.

I fell for this as well. Years ago, I bought the gold reports and recorded the statistics of the reversals in the gold reports. It was amazing. Why did it work so well then? Because it was a year's worth of steady declines. Then the market turned and MA missed the bounce, still writing bearish messages. For me, this was devastating. After the fact, months later he bragged about the system being right again because it had sent a long term quarterly bullish reversal superimposed with a shorter time quarterly bearish reversal. This is a real model case.


Year End Report 2015:

When we look at gold going into year-2015, we see absolute critical support at
1044. A year-end closing g beneath this level will signal new lows and they can
be quite dramatic. From a technical perspective, the two key targets will be
1026 and 601. Important resistance during 2016 will begin at 1179 with key
resistance forming at 1310. Therefore, even a year-end closing for 2015 below
1179 will keep gold in a bearish position.
Additionally, we have a Quarterly Bearish Reversal at 1112. Therefore, a yearend
closing below this level should also warn of a drop becomes possible at
least to test the 875 to 904 former high of 1980. A monthly closing beneath 904
would also point to a drop way down to the 680 area.


Gold elected the quarterly bearish but we heard about the quarterly bullish too late the next year:

Another anomaly was that at the end of 2015, we elected the Quarterly Bearish
Reversal at 1112 closing at 1060.20. At the same time, that low generated a
minor Quarterly Bullish Reversal at 993. So we generated a long-term sell signal,
but a short-term buy signal. The next two Quarterly Bullish generated were at
1308 and 1347. That meant we should first rally typically for 2 to 3 months in a
reaction and if they failed to be elected by the close of March, then the longterm
trend should resume to retest support.

When he writes At the same time, he is lying.

I never heard about that 993 bullish at the time when it was needed. Note that this is a bullish reversal that is generated well below market price. The number 993 is likely just made up. It is NOT a reversal in a sense that is generated prior for you to examine. And I bought the report which comes in installments with videos and so on, covering a year (not ending at end of year but going well into that period where we should have received that signal) and that reversal was not available. So what are these superposition events then? They come after the fact! They are fraudulent. The system discovers that it is wrong and voila, it has an automatic excuse. Months later? Give me a break! Like the weekly superposition events. They come out on Monday when the system discovers that the price has crossed the threshold that marks the failure of the elected reversal. They should be called REVISION signals

Revision Signals

because superposition is something else. Superposition is when a resulting signal is composed of multiple signal components at the same time, simultaneously, to form a more complex signal. Not a corrective signal is added at a later time. So it is all misleading left, right and center and incompetence is everywhere.

Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

[rosousa]

We´re mixing things here.

One thing is MA forecasts, which don´t have any value to trading/investment as the entry/exit timing is unknown variable. If their forecasts were of any value for Investment, they were not given for free from someone that charges so much for simple market history review reports.

 The other thing is Socrates which have built-in some good technical indicators (some of them with fancy names like Energy instead of regular know as Momentum oscillator and Cycles represented on fancy graphics/ARRAY´s instead of plain english cycle is up on X time frame but at same time is down on X time frame like Charles Nenner do on his research/market alerts service).

Some of technical indicators are very valuable, specially the internal calculation of support/resistance price areas (Reversals). But as overall standalone product for trading/investing missing extremely important features:
1) Search on database for setups/ alignment between indicators/reversals.
2) You been able to back-test your ideas using the indicators built-in on the software to find a approach that fits you and more important than that: Gives you confidence to stick to your rules when things start to go wrong on one trade.

As the system is a black-box system, that people suppose to use blind, for anyone that want to invest some serious $, is worthless until the point you be able to replicate the formulas/inputs on the indicators in the "black-box" indicators and you´re successful on built-in the data on a decent software with back-testing features or simple that let you export the data into spreadsheet/excel to back-test and to see with your eyes what really work and what is worthless inside the large number of indicators/tech tools inside Socrates. And getting it to next level, you use what work best from Socrates with what had been working best for you on the markets - Elliot Waves, Fibonacci, Gann, Wyckoff, Cycles studies, RSI, MACD I could go on forever naming good approaches/indicators as the´re +100 good ones. What been working best together along so much tools/approaches you only could know if you can test it.

Without back-testing it you will never know the real numbers/success rate/win rate to be able to manage your risk and build a trading/investment approach.

Using Socrates, is like driving your car blind on a well know route, it could go well and you´re a hero, but most of the time you will just crash your car and have a expensive hospital and car repair service bill!  

RS
https://twitter.com/ricardosousaIA

[trc4949]

The very sad part of this story is that a 'day laborer' sold all the coins for a lousy $6,000

All I can say is you better do your homework before you sell some coins to a coin shop, or they will rape you financially big time

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/cult-economist-jailed-for-hiding-rare-coins-says-they-re-his-now

[s29]

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/interest-rates/public-v-private-interest-rates-sovereign-debt-crisis/

Public v Private Interest Rates & Sovereign Debt Crisis
Blog/Interest Rates
Posted Jun 13, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Dear Martin I have a question for the blog. There has been forecasts for a sovereign debt crisis but recently you have discussed how various governments may manipulate govt bond interest rates down as has happened in Europe and Japan. If Europe and Japan are anything to go by then this could go on for some time. If govts are successful in this, does this mean that there may not be a sovereign debt crisis?

ANSWER: The Sovereign Debt Crisis involves crossing the line where the private sector no longer trusts government debt. We have begun to cross that line in Europe and Japan where the central banks are buying the debt in bulk. There have even been German auctions of bonds where there was no bid.

Yes, the central banks can artificially keep government interest rates low, but that is only possible when they are the buyers.

We are already experiencing rising interest rates in the peripheral governments where their central banks do not engage in QE — namely emerging markets. We will witness private rates rise for that is a free market. However, from the government side of the table, the Sovereign Debt Crisis is among the developed countries engaging in QE that has unfolded as there is NO BID. They can artificially keep rates low ONLY because the central banks buy the debt. Nobody in the private sector would buy 10 years paper at 1% to 3% when they need 8% to break even in pension funds.

Also, pay attention to the state/provincial debt where they do not have the ability to buy their own nonsense. The manipulation of rates will be at the federal level, not in the state/provincial and municipal levels of government.

So, pay attention to the bifurcation in rates that is unfolding between PUBLIC v PRIVATE.

Again a post how Armstrong simply backtracks his bond crisis calls, which he's been calling for years Which is funny, because central banks are doing this for a decade now. Armstrong finally wakes up, just after German bunds and several other countries are making new all time bond yield lows. Great timing, Marty, really in front of the curve!

[DanB1]

Yes, I saw that post as well.

"We are already experiencing rising interest rates in the peripheral governments where their central banks do not engage in QE — namely emerging markets."

This morning I checked yields across the curve of many countries. The only country where I can see the yields really increasing is Pakistan. Does anyone disagree?

But I do believe he has a point in the thesis that money will move from public to private. As soon as 1 country (Turkey for instance) gets in trouble, it will all happen very fast.
Although I think money will not flow directly from public to private. Most of it will move in to German, Dutch, Swiss, US bonds probably.