The more I dig into Armstrong the more bizarre it gets. The story about those coins is just one more crazy detail. How he can forget about that, as far as I understand they were stashed in his own mother's house? To whom the 2.5 Million went when everything was settled long time ago?
I read a lot of Armstrong's writings from the 90s lately, he basically said very much the same things back then as today. So he clearly lost his mind in jail.
Sometimes it looks to me he's not in control at all and is being used by some third party. Who knows who writes these blog posts, who really is behind socrates, who's managing these trolls. I think there are plenty of people in the back who live quite well from his doings
I think you are on the right track. Focusing on what you wrote, I like to understand it like this:
First Martin Armstrong is interesting because of his colorful history. He has CULTIVATED a broad audience that is a conglomerate of many fringe groups. You can still see how that works today. Every few weeks or months, he picks up something new from fringe publications which are often re-published at Zero Hedge. That type. Global Warming, George Soros, Convid-19, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab. You name it, he has it. We can see from that small collection that he capitalizes on grievances. So he picks up conspiracy theories and merges these into his mix of content aggregation so he has cheap stuff to write on his web site every day. Once the principle is clear, everybody could do it following the basic rules. That and the easy to digest layout of his site creates the click bait for traffic. So he is an asset from that perspective.
Other small publishers, these YouTubers, like to interview him or have some of his content on their site because with that wide audience, he creates traffic on their site as well. These are, IMHO, what you refer to the third party that controls him. No single party. They have needs, the need to create a portfolio of content, they need someone like a "Deepstater" for example and Martin Armstrong fits the bill. They look at Armstrong's buddy USAWatchdog.com Greg Hunter and say: "Wow, that's the traffic we want". I have been in a conversation with one of these - this is really how it works.
As usual, I provide some proof. See how this symbiotic relationship works here:
Armstrong Interview in Germany with CAP TRADERwhich embeds this YouTube video:
Martin Armstrong - his legacy, build back better, short selling, no taxation, Dow Jones 40000 & moreMore clicks for CAP TRADER, more clicks for Martin Armstrong's online store. Martin Armstrong is desperate for fresh victims.
There is more to it, because he himself often BUYS the traffic that creates the illusion for these third parties so they get what they want. At the same time these shills that generate the traffic are promoting his content with "More vids please", Marty my superhero". Sometimes, some hyped real cult members might actually write that as well, and sometimes we see the difference between real and shill.
So it is like a food chain that everybody profits from, and everybody just wants a share of these people, the audience, to get the traffic on their sites. Some kind of snowball effect.
Regarding these coins, this was clearly an accident. He speculated that his jail time was worth it as long as he could live off the hidden assets after release. This idea that the jail time has done some damage to his brain is a half truth because he never was a genius anyway - this is just hype and we know that he is good at generating that hype. Then when they were found, he gambled. He thought he could claim ownership and nobody would find out about it. The whole episode clearly shows that he is really not very intelligent at all. It is fairly stupid to get into jail and spend 11 years there anyway. In jail, he would have learned additional tricks, mainly how to manipulate people that would have assisted him to plan his comeback the way he did it. We know that he is quite comfortable with cut and paste, and he has teams in Asia who write for him. No way he can generate all this content while he is spending thousands of hours acting as a shill in all these media channels. That is a big thing to keep in mind - we have exposed him here - there is no doubt about it. I know the aliases he is using, and additionally he buys these 50 cents YouTube messages to create artificial conversations. We have seen messages in this forum from his conference attendees that his daughter runs the business with him, and there are other people like Erwin Pletsch. Take only a handful of people or less and a few hardcore retired followers and you have enough manpower to run the show. Once you realize it is just a show where everybody is aligned with the common objective, to fleece the little guy, keep them happy confirming their views, and when they disagree then silence them, create more shill traffic. It has been working like that for years. See:
ArmstrongEconomics - The Scam Business Model Expos?I found it really hard to put that page together from that mosaic of components of this scam, but it helped me that I kept this goal in my mind for years that I would eventually have to write something like this. It helped that I tried to keep each page focused on a single objective that allowed me to create a hyperlink structure without getting too confused. It is basically that attempt to figure out what is behind all this, very much with the questions in mind that you are asking. At the end of the day, it is the result of maximizing profit, to get as many victims into the show as possible. This system needs new victims all the time. The amazing thing is how it is optimized to keep Socrates users as long as possible by shifting the trading time frame into longer periods while at the same time ramping up the money spent on services until the users run out of money and throw the towel.
This goes as far as making the clients believe that the holy grail is not Martin Armstrong but either
1) YOU as a genius who will find a way to unfold the true potential of the system because Martin Armstrong has never been able to use his own system correctly.
or
2) Someone else who is the new expert and is able to create fireworks with nice looking mosaics and complex overlays of charts like this shill LateralusYellow at Armstrong's reddit forum. Who knows who that person is and how he profits from all that. But one thing is certain: He knows the script, how to exploit the ambiguities and how to silence people who disagree.
Who wrote Socrates? Programmers. It is a fairly basic but messy mix of stuff. The fact that this actually has a name creates the illusion that it is a system. It is not. it has myriads of parts that cannot be tied together. It is smoke and mirrors, and what it says depends on what you want to hear, from which perspective you look at it.
Martin Armstrong would have influenced it grabbing ideas he saw elsewhere. Like I was told he was once the president of that cycles society, with the objective to harvest the knowledge in it for trading purposes which that society was not interested in.
I can see how this patchwork was created, the attempt to fix the problems of that reversal system with the forecast arrays - an attempt that was bound to fail. We can see that in these patches like that magic numbers, cycle inversion, aggregation of various signals etc.. We can see, and that is the amazing part, that
IT WAS ADAPTED AND OPTIMIZED OVER TIME TO LOOK GOOD AND PLAUSIBLE IN HINDSIGHT,
not for trading performance. It is basically a sales engine.
Otherwise, for the user it is useless. There is simply no easy way to predict timing from previous movement. Timing is driven by unpredictable events most of the time. Sometimes it looks like it is driven by simple trading activity, but whether it is that or something else, that changes all the time.
There is no way one can plug this into an optimizer because the results depend on human interpretation in hindsight. In other words, a system is something that produces output from inputs using its internal rules that can be tuned using parameters. Then you can plug that system into an optimizer to tune the parameters. ?Even Microsoft Excel can do that.
With Socrates, there is input which is the time series. Let's look at the reversal system. Output is the reversals. Problem is it has multiple outputs, different time frames, major reversals, minor reversals. And it doesn't tell you which one to use, how long to trade them, what the stop loss is and so on. If you look at that alone, it is pathetic. It's designed by a fool. And that fool is Martin Armstrong, and the programmers would have just said; "Alright, I am here to make money, and I just do as I am told - he is not going to notice anyway that it doesn't work because he is a fool". Period.
And then Martin Armstrong used it to trade the markets with money stolen from investors and lost those 700 Million USD. So here we have the shocking proof that he is in fact a fool because only a fool would do that.
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. More than 60 pages of analysis of Martin Armstrong, his business practices, his products and services and Socrates. Provided by the Martin Armstrong client community.
Every single defrauded person should report their case, see
Where and how to complain
Hi,
I am shocked to see that you cooperate with the biggest scammer world wide, Martin Armstrong.
I am referring to three of your latest videos that you spam YouTube with:
Martin Armstrong - his legacy, build back better, short selling, no taxation, Dow Jones 40000 & moreand
Martin Armstrong ?Urgent! What Cathie Wood JUST Said About A Stock Market Crash!Dow Jones 40000 (duplicate of the above)
and
Martin Armstrong im gro?en CapTrader Interview - Klaus Schwab - keine Steuern - Prognosen & mehr
######################################################################
Martin Armstrong is a world renown criminal - a convicted felon who spent 11 years in jail for securities fraud.
######################################################################
see:
Martin Armstrongand
ArmstrongEconomics - The Scam Business Model Expos?Here we have over 60 pages of facts that have been compiled by the community of clients defrauded by Armstrong Economics.
Most recently, as a thief, he has even claimed ownership of his booty, a 2.5 million USD rare coins cache that he bought with money stolen from investors. Part of the 15 million assets that he refused to turn over as ordered by the judge. Now he is once again scamming his clients. With his online store where he sells snake oil and the Socrates software that he used to lose the 700 million USD that he stole from investors.
See:
A Goldstein Law Partners WIN: Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Heritage AuctionAnd you are conveniently ignoring these facts that are all over the internet just to get some clicks. You are complicit. I am requesting that you delete these interview videos immediately.
Sincerely,
AnonymousCoder
... Hmmm
An online broker interviews a failed trader, an ex-fund manager convicted of securities fraud.
To get new clients.
This is as close to suicide as it gets.
And here is how our fraudster plays the game with his sock puppet show:
The puppet (definitely Martin Armstrong)
User NameThe message:Brilliant interview and a super guest! ??
The appropriate response would be:
Hello Martin Armstrong, we know it's you.
Martin Armstrong The Hyper ShillThe puppet (definitely Martin Armstrong)
Karl GKThe message:thank you Admin for bringing Mr Armstrong to this channel, I am subscribed.
looking good martin
Again, the appropriate response would be:
Hello Martin Armstrong, we know it's you.
Martin Armstrong The Hyper ShillThe puppet (definitely Martin Armstrong)
Brad StudioThe message:All the anti-Armstrong trolls on this thread are burned gold bugs, they loath him for exposing their gold scams every single time.
Again, the appropriate response would be:
Hello Martin Armstrong, we know it's you.
Martin Armstrong The Hyper ShillAlso thanks to this common sense guy who pointed out the obvious (deleted):
GLENNEMALL ONITSOWNThe message:You certainly don't want to work with a broker that got tricked by Armstrong. Great promotional stunt for sure rofl
Und ein Deutscher ?bertrifft sich selbst und alle Superlative:
BillyThe message:Danke - kenne fast alle Interviews mit Martin - aber diese Tiefe haben sehr wenige erreicht
Here is a Martin Armstrong shill / Socrates apologist promoting that hindsight smoke and mirrors machine:
ColetrainThe message:On every video about Armstrong you will find some poor tortured soul who is on a mission to tell everyone about how much of a scam artist Martin allegedly is. I have been using Socrates for several years. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can easily falsify such claims by simply charting the reversals (price targets) and arrays (timing targets) and just watch in amazement how the market moves precisely around them. But make no mistake there is a lot of nuance to using Socrates. Also quite frankly there are many inconsistencies so it is very much a work in progress, and they still have a disclaimer at the top of the website warning you of that.
On the one hand it is most definitely as powerful as Martin says it is, as there have been many many many lows and highs I have seen that were forecasted to the precise basis point. For example in January Socrates called the low in Natural Gas to the precise number when NG futures closed exactly on the weekly bearish reversal (2.446) on January 22nd... 4 weeks later there was a winter storm in Texas and NG had rallied over $3. That week was also a bullish super-position event on a weekly level, of which you could have predicted by utilizing the hypothetical reversal system. Anyone trying to learn to use Socrates MUST learn what super-position events are, because they are extremely powerful signals. When markets get extremely overbought or oversold relative to the time level in question, you will start to see bullish reversals generated below price action and bearish reversals generated above price action. I think the reason for this has to do with the psychology of market participants, as on the one hand everyone knows the risk if the market makes a serious move in the other direction but they also have a fear of missing out on a seemingly endless trend. So the bullish and bearish reversals start to overlap and the market becomes schizophrenic and dances on a knifes edge where a close at one level will have more people buying in but at a slightly lower level everyone will start selling. That January low in Natural Gas was also obvious because it was on a timing target (low aggregate target) and below the 2.446 reversal was a massive gap down to 2.300 where the next weekly bearish was. Paying attention to gaps and clusters of reversals is a big part of learning how to use Socrates.
On the other hand it is very much still a work in progress, the way the information is presented is very scattered and inconsistent, you will have to dig through several different pages and various text reports to get all the reversals. My guess is the original idea was to prevent information overload for clients by having only the first 5 reversals available on the reversals page, but personally I just want everything important on one page (Timing Arrays AND text timing tables, and ALL reversals including hypothetical reversals available on one compact page). In my experience everything else is far less important, and the fact that you have to dig through so many pages and sections to get all of it is a real pain point. There have been times where I missed an opportunity because some of the nearest reversals were listed in one of the text reports but not on the reversals page. Personally I don't find the information nearly as helpful unless I have it all charted on a live chart. This is a very time consuming process to move through all the reports and different sections, and get it all in a usable format on live charts. I have missed many great opportunities because that workload takes away time from actually analyzing the market and managing positions. At the WEC last year they showed a preview of the new version of Socrates that will have live charts with all the information available on it, this should be a vast vast improvement. MY ADVICE to anyone who wants to learn to use Socrates, learn to love the hypothetical reversal system and don't even bother trying to learn to use Socrates if you are not going to chart everything. I recommend using Trade Navigator charting software, that is what one of the long time associates of Armstrong has been using to chart Socrates models and after trying many different kinds of software I can see why he uses it. No other charting software that I tried was really appropriate for such a unique method of analysis and forecasting, and it simply comes down to the way their drawing tools work.
Please report the videos and the channels, noting that the videos are duplicate and that CAP TRADER publishes duplicate content on two channels:
CapTraderand
Economic Predictions 2020See also (advertising metrics included):
Martin Armstrong The Humanist ImpostorMartin 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. More than 60 pages of analysis of Martin Armstrong, his business practices, his products and services and Socrates. Provided by the Martin Armstrong client community.
Every single defrauded person should report their case, see
Where and how to complain
Complete Breakdown of Confidence in Armstrong Forum
See:
Clarifying latest (Mar 10th) post by MartinSamples:
Totally agree, I did exactly the same, i have followed him for years now and am finally starting to realise I have been a fool. I have purchased a number of reports that have turned out to be the same old stuff he keeps repeating time and time again. The warning signs were there as early at the end of 2018 when I purchased the How to trade a vertical market report. The conclusion to that said, We are indeed in a PLATEAU move and would be moving straight on up. He blames Gates and co to cover himself that he got the March low incorrect and we missed the slingshot because he kept saying we would crash again. He got Bitcoin wrong, he said the property market topped 2015. The 2020 virtual conference was again a repeat of what he has been spewing all year. He creates the fear to keep us hooked. He got me hooked when he said he wanted to help the little guy, That was when he would say just buy the Reversals. The reversals are so complicated now,and there are so many different kinds I haven?t got a clue a which ones to follow. Same time,What if, superposition,major minor ? And exactly the same with the turning points so so complicated. The Private blog just confuses things even more. He now wants to charge a fortune to show us how to use Socrates by video blog . The methodology for Socrates is so confusing. I think the easiest thing to do is avoid at all cost and just buy the dip and use Mac D, and stochastic along with moving average. it will save you a fortune and endless days of confusion.
I agree with all the critical feedback here. Evaporation of the slingshot is one that bothers me the most. How many times did he reinforce that same nonsense only to have it disappear. I have tried every tier of Socrates and it is an utter mess of information and not likely coming from any computer at all. The terrible formatting and consistent typos in the detailed reports are proof there is no computer at all. I respect the posts from LateralusYellow but really there is no way to learn to use this garbled presentation for any reliable forecasting. Sure when the market goes straight up for 10 years people start to think they are trading with some edge but its not from Socrates. You can get the same or better results from any pivot point model. Martin is a legend in his own mind and his presentations are always contradicting themselves. The pro tier of Socrates is garbage and the penny pinching special reports that also offer no insight are also garbage. He is not out to help any little guy, he is just another scam guru exploiting the market for personal profit.
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. More than 60 pages of analysis of Martin Armstrong, his business practices, his products and services and Socrates. Provided by the Martin Armstrong client community.
Every single defrauded person should report their case, see
Where and how to complain[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]