Thank you AnonymousCoder & Traxo for your timely replies.
If Armstrong could at least be prepared to discuss his previous calls during the WEC's I wouldn't mind so much because knowing where you went wrong in a trade is just as important as knowing why you were right! Secondly, humility is a very important asset when dealing with a large group of people who are eager to learn & by not being accountable for his calls, he makes the same mistake as the politicians to which he blames in all of his writings.
Each WEC should at least start off from the previous WEC to show continuity & to address those areas which had either proven to be correct or incorrect. At least then the audience would be given a fair & open assessment of what to expect for their $2,500.
It should also be noted that Mr Armstrong did not graduate in Economics from University & thus is not technically an Economist so surely the team at AE would be even more keen to prove their abilities at predicting the future by going over the number of correct/incorrect calls from the previous WEC?
This is my sticking point with Armstrong & the answer is clearly one of two things: a) They have the worst PR department in the history of any business or b) He is a indeed a fake.....
I take no pleasure in writing this last statement & of course I am open to criticism but I have also taught higher degree level learning at University & I am well aware of what it takes to deliver material to eager students & be able to discuss events after the fact.
(Long post warning. This will be my last post of 2019 on these boards, and it has been very interesting sharing comments about MA over the past 6 months or so.)I attended the 2018 WEC, but with a strange intention: I wanted to find out if MA was indeed a fraud, where I had been following his blog for a good few years. Through most of that time, I genuinely thought he was onto something very interesting with his ECM, though never traded on it. I had also heard before of pi constantly appearing in nature, and in ancient history (Great Pyramids), so the concept didn't seem too far fetched.
However, I question everything and am not one that likes being played a fool, so began to think, as much as I enjoyed his blog content, is this just a very clever hoax? I even thought it could be brilliant Russian
dezinformatsiya, something I had read a book about through the same period I had stumbled across MA. That was also something I noticed: he hardly ever mentioned, nor is he ever negative, about Russia. He also had some kind of dealings with Russia because of the Sacra connection. He is very anti-West, and while I am no fan of any Western government, neither am I fan of Russia, or any other foreign government either. That too made me wonder whether he might have a pro-Russia agenda.
I can't evidence any connection here, but it added to my BS-o-meter and made me want to research some contrarian opinions from other people.
Why then did I decide to spend thousands of dollars travelling to, and attending the WEC?
This is going to sound odd, but I attended to prove to myself that this was all BS. It would also give me an opportunity to meet the man himself, and ask a burning question that might also help me make up my mind about MA. I'll elaborate on that below. Finally, it was then around the time of him promoting his "last ever" European WEC in Rome 2019, that I found this Bitcoin Forum on MA, which seemed to be the only place with a very active discussion about MA's legitimacy. At the time, I was trying to find more "dirt" on MA, as I thought surely he cannot be correct 100% of the time (or his alleged machine, which are still susceptible to errors, malfunctions, etc)?
Turns out he was wrong. Often. And this forum was - and remains - brilliant for in-depth analysis and personal tales of trades gone wrong on the back of ECM predictions or MA opinions - both of which are almost impossible to decipher based on the ambiguity of his writings, from blog posts to his eye-wateringly priced reports. There is a reason MA has no comment sections on his site: he can then fully control the narrative and the mystique around his "legend".
In terms of the WEC, I was very surprised when sat next to family of Canadians. One of this group told me they had attended "multiple" WECs, which I found surprising as we are talking about just one family who had dropped tens of thousands of dollars, not including travel and accommodation costs. Yet they also explained they did not understand reversals nor had access to the
arrays, which resemble something from an Atari in any case. I still wonder to this day why they felt the need to attend so many, where that money could have been placed on a DOW JONES tracker and they would have been sat on a very healthy return, without needing MA's input (if there even was any).
Others I spoke to also explained they didn't know how to trade off Socrates. I also spoke to a professional fund manager from Cincinnati, if memory serves me right. He explained he appeared regularly on finance sections of the local TV stations. He also told me he didn't rely on MA for trading, but found some of his content interesting. There was also a very young kid from Canada, who told me he was a full time trader, working from home, and found MA's calls brilliant and the cornerstone of his success. A plant maybe?
The average demographic was older white males, nearing retirement age or retired. Wealthy, with money to invest or "save" from the impending financial Armageddon MA had prophesied.
And that is where, being as objective as possible, MA is essentially leading a cult. Like all cults, the Day of Armageddon (2015.75) came to pass, and nothing happened. Countless other doomsday calls, like the "financial, economic and banking chaos" that he wrote about early 2019, that was supposed to happen around the time of the EU elections - also passed with nothing of note happening.
Read Robert Cialdini's book
Influence, which has an entire chapter on cults. It explains typical and predictable human behaviour. With cults, if the
day of Armageddon passes with barely a strong gust of wind, rather than disband, the followers become even more fervent in their beliefs, trying to convince others that their new-found belief system really does have meaning, and something terrible IS going to happen, so REPENT and also follow MA before it's too late!
This likely is a typical outcome, where to that Canadian family I met - someone must have been waxing lyrical about MA, and more cultists then join.
At the 2018 WEC, while the macroeconomic stuff was interesting, it is nothing a few good books on the subject and contrarian economists would also cover. MA touched lightly on Socrates, explaining the IF THEN ELSE code, which I thought - not being a coder - sounded very basic for something that was supposed to be so advanced, MA is being hounded by the CIA for his code. He also stood on stage without much conviction as he was talking about this, but that's ok.
Remember the typical demographic?
Most of them are technical Luddites because of their age, so are none the wiser.
I also managed to speak to MA very briefly at his "legendary" hors d'oeuvres. I asked him a simple question:
How can Socrates possibly be accurate where accuracy of any model is only as good as the data it is given? That data is
limitless, meaning Socrates cannot possibly be correct all of the time.
MA seemed taken aback and defensive I would dare ask such a question, and bluntly explained the ECM has "never been wrong" going back to the 1987 stock market crash. It was at that moment, I thought... BS. I work in the communications industry in a role that uses lots of data and ML. Even SIMPLE predictions are often wrong because the data quality or volume is never good/large enough.
And MA is explaining he effectively has access to limitless data, meaning his machine's predictions are correct 100% of the time? It is actually absurd when you think about it and the science is as bad as the climate scientists he loves to criticise (though I do share the same sentiments). Interestingly, MA has also explained on his blog that he uses an IBM supercomputer that we have also found to be a bogus claim. That supercomputer uses significant amounts of energy.
Thus, if MA is telling the truth, his machine would have to consume if not enormous amounts of energy - LIMITLESS amounts of energy - where the only way it could predict things to 100% accurac is with limitless data.
Otherwise, his model uses sampled data, which is useful to a point. But it will always be off by +/- percentage and is there as a predictable model, not a definitive guide. And yet MA explains his ECM is a definitive guide.
It is BS. As brilliantly explained in some comments over the past one or two pages, the supercomputer and the government wanting his code are all a smokescreen, to confuse and cover up his real game, which is to create as much mystique around his being as possible. That is what gets him a loyal following. It sells WEC tickets, expensive reports (which are 99% ramblings about history, 1% ambiguous opinions on the future), and Socrates subs.
And that affords him a very nice retirement, plus some very nice "friends".
Speaking of which, at the hors d'oeuvres evening of the 2018 WEC, MA - who was surrounded by fawning WEC attendees like some Jesus figure - eventually sauntered off with a young and attractive Indian (Asia, not America) woman. It made me wonder what those WEC tickets had paid for, and just how much that lady was with MA because of his
youthful appearance, boyish good looks, extreme wit and muscular physique... Unless it was an employee, though she did not appear until the very end of the night. If you have the money...
p.s. of MAs calls where I have come good. I bet with a friend on the index of European banking shares. Over a 1 year period, if the index was 10% higher, my friend won. 10% lower, I won. That bet was placed based on MAs call AND knowing there were major problems with the EU banking system. I won the bet. Did MA help here? Maybe, but then it was tantamount to predicting the favourite horse is going to win the race, so hardly groundbreaking, and I already held strong opinions on the direction of EU banks. There had been countless bankruptcies as one thing.
The other was the rise of the USD vs GBP. However, that too was easy to predict where anything concerning Brexit being cancelled saw sterling rise, and if Brexit seemed more likely, it would tank. That cycle kept occurring multiple times a year from June 2016. It was one of the most sure bets on FX you could place. I, and not MA, called the bottom of the GBP/USD slide in August 2019, and one of the last highs of that year in March 2019. MA confirmed the trend, but like the above, no better than any other analyst. Plus, GBP/USD all through the 3+ years of Brexit became very easy to predict. Oh, and it has bounced back and is likely to continue rising through at least H1 2020. Why didn't Socrates predict that?
And that too takes a lot of the gloss off MA's mystique. He seems to know a lot about macroeconomics. But his predictions are no better than anyone else; Socrates quite likely doesn't exist and if it does, it is bogus; and you cannot trade on Socrates/the reversals either. The ECM is interesting, but also impossible to trade off, unless your investment style is buying large tracker funds or long term bets on currency. For that, you also do not need MA. You can buy a few good books on trading and it covers sensible trades for long term growth, most of which are based around trackers/funds.
Caveat emptor.
